L'Atterrissage
by with the monsters
Summary: Liberate your sons and daughters; some are gods and some are monsters. - -for misswhiteblack's Next Generation Competition.
1. victoire

**a/n**: okay, this is the first of a series of romantic oneshots for each of the Weasley/Potter Next-Generation kids, for misswhiteblack's challenge/contest.

This first is Victoire, with the song _Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy _by Queen.

Thanks to Leesha (Vanity Sinning) for providing me with the quote that gave me the vast majority of my inspiration for this piece.

(Lyrics in summary from SOS by Take That.)

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_You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. – _Inception.

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**steady as she goes**  
that's the recipe to  
put a vagabond on his hands and knees  
- _What A Shame, Shinedown_

_

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_

The girl in the red coat waits, clutching a stuffed bunny rabbit in one chubby hand and her mother's fingers in the other.

She is the only splash of colour on the smoky platform, grey and black with the dirt of years of trains coming and going, passing through the station with no regard for the worries and hopes and dreams of the people getting onto and off them.

The girl's mother bends suddenly to raise her daughter's hood, concern etched into her face as she arranges the little girl's pretty blonde curls to rest against the breast of the bright coat, dropping a quick kiss on her forehead and murmuring something to her, too quiet to be heard over the roar of the trains entering and leaving the station.

The girl mutters a reply, her little navy shoes kicking disconsolately at a puddle, her face downcast. The mother sighs, whispers a comforting nothing, and then she straightens back up to face the train tracks.

Silence reigns over the pair, the mute stares of admiring men for the mother and the curious stares of other women for this beautiful woman and her china-doll little daughter.

"Miss," a man says, finally breaking the little bubble of quiet that surrounds them, and one pair of blue and one pair of brown eyes turn to fix on him with an unnerving iciness. The man continues uneasily, "I noticed you've been standing here for quite some time now. I just wanted to check that the two of you were okay."

The woman takes in his station steward's uniform, the lust in his eyes that he tries to hide, the honest concern on his features as he regards her.

"We're fine, thank you," she responds calmly, brushing a speck of dust off her grey wool coat, her eyes shuttered and cool. "We're waiting for a train."

"A train where?" the man presses, his hat twisting in his hands, "Because I could tell you when the next one's coming, so you'd know if you have time to get a coffee or something."

"We're not sure yet, are we, Lo?" the woman asks, turning to her child. "We'll know when it comes."

"You'll know," the man repeats, and the little girl lifts her head to glare at him from under her red hood.

"Yes sir," she says firmly, her fair cheeks rosy with the cold, "We'll know."

"Well, okay then," the man replies, and he walks away looking confused and muttering something about the changeability of women and how he'll never understand them. Mother and daughter share a private smile and return their gazes to the train tracks.

"This one, Maman?" the girl asks, and her mother watches the next train arrive.

"No, Lo, I think not," she decides, and Lo nods seriously and together they silently watch the train pass through.

"Why couldn't Daddy come too?" the little girl ventures finally, once the next train is gone, rushing away into the distance. "He likes trains."

"He can't come because he's the reason we're leaving, sweetheart," the mother replies gently, "Him and his work and because he shouted at me for all sorts of mean things."

"I think some of the things he said were at least a little bit true," Lo argues, raising one mittened hand to push her hood backwards, shaking her curls out and fixing her brown-eyed gaze on her mother. "Don't you, Maman? Like about me going to his school from when he was younger."

"Lo, we've discussed this," her mother argues, breath puffing out in front of her on the cold air, "We're going to be sending you to the wizarding school that Lux and Caroline and Arthur are going to. In Worcestershire."

"But, Maman," the little girl replies, "I don't _want _to go to school in Wooftershire. I want to go to Daddy's school."

"Lo, you're not like Daddy," her mother reminds her, crouching down in front of her and winding one of her daughter's blonde locks around her forefinger. "You're special, like me and like Auntie Dominique and Uncle Sebastian and Grandmère and Grandfather, and all of your other aunts and uncles and cousins."

"But I want to be like _Daddy_," Lo argues passionately, looking dangerously close to stomping her foot. "I don't _want _to be special."

"You can't help being special," another voice suddenly says, and mother and daughter whirl to find the man who spoke staring down at them with a mixture of amusement and desperation written across his features, and he's forgotten his jacket in his haste and he's all _passionpassionpassion _and the woman stares at him and sees all the shades of the good old-fashioned lover boy he was when they first met. "You _are _special, Lo. You should be proud of that."

"Daddy!" Lo exclaims with delight, abandoning her mother's hand and racing across the short space of platform between them and him, throwing herself into his arms and giggling as he lifts her, spinning her around neatly and then clutching her close.

"Don't you ever leave me again, okay?" he says into her hair, and she hugs him tightly around the neck and promises.

"Never, Daddy."

"Victoire," he says, raising his face from his daughter to look at his wife, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I should never have said those things. I wish I could take them back. But please, I am _begging _you – please come back. You and Leonora. I _need _you."

"But you _said _them," Victoire replies, her pretty face looking terribly pained. "You _said _them, Matthew."

"Please, he says in a much quieter tone, shifting Lo over to one arm so he can stretch the other out to Victoire, "Please, 'Toire. I can't bear it without you."

"Come on, Maman," Lo presses, her head pressed against her father's, "Let's go home, and you can make a cake and we can take Alfie for a walk and then you can let me stay up all night to watch cartoons."

"Steady on, cricket," Matthew interrupts, bouncing his daughter and trying to hide a grin. "There's no way you're staying up _all_ night."

"I'm four now," she reminds him seriously, patting his dark brown, curly hair with one mittened hand, "I'm old enough to stay up all night if I want to."

"I think not," Matthew and Victoire reply at the same time, and then they turn and stare at each other for a long moment.

"Please, Maman," Lo says, suddenly deadly serious, reaching out one arm for her mother, "Please come home with us."

"I'll do anything," Matthew adds, daring to take a step closer. "I can't live without you."

"You know," Victoire says, bending to pick up her suitcase and hiding a smile as Lo breaks out into a cheer, "You two would make a great pair of actors."

"Maman, Maman!" Lo cries with delight, clapping her hands and laughing with pure joy as her father gathers her mother closely up against him, Lo trapped in the middle and cheering for the wonder of it.

"Never leave again?" Matthew suggests, and Victoire smiles up at him and then kisses him deeply, much to Lo's disgust.

"I'll try," she replies, and suddenly Lo's red-sleeved arms are going around both of them and she's pushing her little head against theirs, still giggling for the relief.

"So where were you going to go?" Matthew inquires as he takes Victoire's suitcase, her arm tucking into his and his other arm still supporting Lo.

"We weren't exactly sure," Victoire replies, smiling at their daughter. "Anywhere – nowhere. I guess we'll never know."

They leave the station, the curly-haired man in the thin t-shirt with his wife in her grey coat and his daughter in her red, and they're not exactly a billboard advertisement for the perfect family – but they're a real one, with hopes and fears and schisms that they work together to breach, because that's what love is about. Not perfection, but something even better.

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**a/n**: next up will be Dominique, I think. I'm afraid there will (by necessity) have to be several OCs in this. I like my OCs, but I know a lot of people run miles from OCs!

If you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	2. james

**a/n**: So I lied, it's actually James and not Dominique, since these are all going to be in age-order. At least, the age order I have the Next-Gen in. I hope you like it, this is the first writing I've done in a while and it's been a bit of struggle. Add that to having not anywhere near enough sleep while in Sicily and, well, I'm sure you get the picture.

With the song _I'd Lie For You_ by Meatloaf. It's not actually quoted anywhere or anything, I just used it for inspiration here and there. I hope that's okay, Kerr!

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_How do you know yer alive if you don't hurt? _– (The Ask and The Answer, Patrick Ness)

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for i am not prepared  
**JamesJenny**

i'm trying to come clean, i will be a better me  
i will not drink until i'm dead, i will make the most of it  
- _Human, Ellie Goulding_

_

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_

He doesn't know when it changed between them but suddenly there's electric charge in their glances and when they touch it's like everything in his body spontaneously combusts.

They've been best friends since the first day of school when he catapulted into her compartment and sat on her by mistake, and she shoved him onto the floor and then stole his last chocolate frog. They've been together for seven years of detentions (on his part), mean ex-boyfriends (on her part), messy potions lessons, heartbreak, exams… everything. He's there to comfort her when she's upset and she's there to scold him when he's in trouble, but also to talk teachers out of giving him even more detentions than he already has.

People are used to putting their names together – they're not even James and Jenny any more, they're JamesandJenny, and she's round at his house so often she might as well be family.

The thing is, James reflects as he sits next to her in History of Magic, is that now she's going out with Alfred McLaggen and the way she looks at him leaves James feeling shaken inside, something gnawing away at his insides that he hasn't felt since Fred got made prefect instead of him in Fifth Year.

"You look constipated," she whispers to him while Binns is droning on about Gnome Rebellions, poking him in the ribs for good measure, "What's eating you?"

"McLaggen," he replies sulkily, staring down at his doodle-covered parchment, "He's an arsehole."

"He's also my _boyfriend_," she warns firmly, and James risks a glance at her to find her scowling, and almost remembers to taper his response appropriately so as not to end up in the Hospital Wing yet again, but not quite.

"He can still be an arsehole, even if he _is_ your boyfriend."

"James," she says patiently, "Don't make me hex you. It's only second lesson."

"You wouldn't," he teases, leaning back in his chair on two back legs, balancing expertly with one hand holding onto the desk, "Of course you wouldn't."

She just looks at him, because she would and they both know it.

"You're just –" she begins, but she's cut off suddenly.

"Potter, sit properly!" the teacher demands from the front of the classroom, and James sighs and flops back down so his chair is on all four legs, ruffling his hair as he does so and shooting a glare at the girl in the row in front who turns around to see what he's up to.

"You're just _jealous_," Jenny hisses into his ear, completing her sentence from earlier, and he whips around instantly to glare at her.

"Lies. I'm just worried about you. I just don't want you to get hurt."

"Oh, but Jamesie," she replies, and James grits his teeth as he realises she's got her irritating side whacked right up to full-blast, "If I do get hurt you'll be there for me to cry on, right?"

"Piss off," he mutters irritably, and she laughs and shakes her head, dropping it onto his shoulder briefly and then pressing a kiss against his neck and sitting upright again, her hair falling in a shiny brown sheet down her back, catching the daylight streaming in through the big windows as it shifts with her movements.

"You're touchy today," she comments as she jots something down on a piece of parchment, and he just rolls his eyes and runs a hand through his hair yet again, starting to tap his wand against the desk.

"And you're observant."

"Very touchy," is the only reply she gives to that, and she's being so utterly infuriating (desirable) with that little smug grin and those dancing brown eyes that he gives up and refuses to talk to her for the rest of the lesson, despite her teasing him to the best of her considerable abilities.

.

"So is it a conscious decision for you to be such an arsehole," James is inquiring of McLaggen roughly three months later, towering over the other boy's bent-double form, his fist still loosely clenched by his thigh, "Or does it just come naturally?"

"What the hell, Potter?" McLaggen replies, gasping for breath, looking up to squint at his attacker. "Are you totally insane?"

"No, no," James tells him in a falsely-reassuring voice, walking in a slow circle around him, revelling in his victory, "Just really, _really _irked by you."

He ignores the fact that McLaggen is mouthing the work 'irked' helplessly, as though unsure whether to mock or try to work out what it means, and continues blithely.

"And I am _also_," James carries on, coming to a halt in front of the other boy again, "Extremely irked by the fact that my best friend is currently sitting up in Gryffindor Tower crying her eyes out over you and your arsehole-ness."

"She's just a slut," McLaggen makes the mistake of saying, hurling the words against James as though they might be true, and James doesn't even waste two seconds before his temper is flaring at full blast and he is laying into McLaggen, not even going for his wand, beating him as hard and as mercilessly as he can, fists flying and his look so murderous it could kill by itself.

"_James_!" he hears a shocked voice shriek, and two seconds later Lily is hanging onto him with all her strength, teeth gritted as she throws her full weight into dragging him backwards and away from McLaggen's unconscious form, "You've _killed _him!"

They both pause then, and look down at the other boy. They can see that he's quite clearly _not _dead, just unconscious and (hopefully) badly hurt.

"What was that for?" Lily inquires, still hanging onto his arm, and James gives it an irritable shake to get her off, tugging on her Slytherin tie to tighten it into a nigh-on impossible-to-undo knot just because.

"He insulted Jenny," he explains as she swears and tries to undo it fruitlessly, "And cheated on her."

"For fuck's sake," Lily explodes, and James isn't even halfway to telling her off for language when she's continuing, "Just bloody go and _tell _the girl how you feel about her, because this is getting seriously pathetic."

"What's getting pathetic?" James asks in bewilderment, but Lily's already storming past him, barely even breaking stride as she stamps on McLaggen's foot for all those times he's insulted her family, disappearing around the corner before James thinks to stop her and get an answer out of her.

Sighing, he pulls out his wand to hex McLaggen a nice purple colour, and then he heads back to Gryffindor Tower.

He finds Jenny curled up on his bed, wrapped in his blanket, tear stains on her cheeks and her hair a mess, spread out all over the bed around her.

"Your knuckles are bloody," she comments, her voice thick, and James shrugs and sits down next to her, his cleaner hand dropping down so he can ghost his fingers against her forehead.

"You okay?"

"Did you beat him up?" she demands, ignoring his question and sitting up, bloodshot eyes narrowed and full of asking. James shrinks back and waits for the inevitable haranguing as he nods assent.

But it doesn't come. Instead she's suddenly clambering into his lap, her skinny arms around his neck and her lips on his cheek as she whispers a thank you against his skin. James smiles and puts his arms around her, and he feels all the sharp angles of her body and the fragility in her limbs and he presses his face into her hair and takes a deep breath, because the truth is that he'd do anything in the world for this girl, anything at all, and he thinks that it's about time she knew that.

"Hey, Jen," he says quietly, "I want to tell you something."

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**a/**n: if you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	3. fred

**a/n**: Fred's turn, with the song _No-one Knows _by Queens of the Stone Age. This was surprisingly easy for me to write, considering that I don't know Fred very well at all. He's always been a little blurry around the edges for me, I'm not entirely sure why. I think I tend to define him by the girls he's with, which is a problem.

Next up is Albus and my favourite of all my OCs, Chloe Nott.

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_Live to the point of tears. _– (Albert Camus)

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through diamond eyes**  
FredAria**

every night of my life i watch angels fall from the sky  
every night that the sun still sets, i pray they don't take mine.  
- _Diamond Eyes, Shinedown_

_

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_

She's always had this attitude that says she won't take any of his bullshit, not even for a second.

(And don't tell anyone this, but that's kind of what he likes best about her.)

;;

He's Fred, the joker of the pack, best mates with pretty much everybody he meets, able to put anybody at ease, even the shy people who sit at the back and pretend they don't want to join in because they're scared they won't get involved properly. Fred always gets them involved.

And, yes, living up to his name is always a challenge, but he's Fred and he takes it on the chin and moves on, because after all he's not his uncle and if his father doesn't know this then everybody else in the world does, and that's okay.

So to most people, he's not "Fred the Second" – he's just Fred. Prefect Fred, easygoing Fred, Fred with the kind smile and the quick wit and the deep laugh.

To her, of course, he's just "", and that's the one label he's not really okay with but he would hate to show any sort of romantic weakness for fear of being mercilessly ribbed by his younger sister and cousins, so he just carries on sitting behind her and being nameless and wondering if she'll ever realise the way he feels, the gift she gives him whenever she smiles at one of his jokes.

And they move up through the school and James hooks up with his best friend Jenny and Fred continues to stare at the back of Aria's head during Charms and even though they're in the same house he's nameless to her even up until they leave school.

;;

He gets a job in the Ministry, despite his father's pleas to work in the Joke Shop. He leaves living up to his father's expectations to Roxanne, since she was always going to be the one who followed in his footsteps anyhow.

Instead he travels by Floo to his office every day, sitting behind a desk and reading reports on broken laws and being as popular with his colleagues as he was at school, keeping peace in the department and making everyone laugh and showing that he's definitely his own person, just Fred, not FredtheSecond.

And then one day, a couple of weeks after his twenty-sixth birthday, he walks into the office and there's a new girl sitting at one of the desks in the large room outside his office.

"Aria," he says before he can stop himself, and she glances up, knee jiggling with nerves beneath the desk, all porcelain skin and sparkling eyes and dark hair.

"Hi," she replies, and suddenly she's standing up and he's reminded how impossibly long her legs are as she comes around her desk towards him, her skirt settling around her thighs as she holds her hand out to him, all of that familiar fire burning in her as she looks him up and down once, consideringly. "I know you."

"Fred," he reminds her, mouth dry, and as he takes her hand he internally marvels that even nine years later she can still reduce him to this, "We were at school together. Gryffindor, same year. I sat behind you in Charms."

Her brow furrows, and then clears suddenly, a smile widening out her features so abruptly it almost makes him take a step back.

"You were the funny one. You always made Professor Merryweather laugh when he was trying to be cross."

He chuckles as he remembers this, and then finally releases her hand and gestures for her to follow him into his office. He takes a seat in the big leather chair behind the desk and conjures up a nice comfortable chair for her opposite him, which she takes, gazing around herself.

"Wow, you've certainly done well for yourself," she announces finally, meeting his gaze, blue eyes mildly impressed. "It's alright for some."

He grins at this, unable to resist, and offers her a cup of coffee. She declines, and he sighs and leans back in his chair.

"So where have you been since Hogwarts? Haven't heard much news about you on the grapevine, no marriage or anything."

"No, I'm a free bird," she replies with a slight trace of self-mockery in her voice that makes him think back to his cousin Albus' girlfriend Chloe, fount of all gossip, telling him about an ex-Gryffindor called Aria Matthews who'd split up from her long-term boyfriend when she found out he'd got another girl pregnant.

"So you've just started working here?" he presses, wondering where that easy confidence he usually feels around other people has fled to, fingering his wand absently.

"I just transferred to this department," she explains, mood apparently lifted, crossing her legs and seeming to relax slightly, "I've been in Regulation of Magical Creatures for a couple of years, but it got a little boring, so I requested a transfer and I ended up here, which I have to admit I'm pretty happy about. They say you're a great boss."

Not for the first time Fred is glad of his dark skin, which hides the blush and lets him take the compliment without a sign that she's just made his day.

"So where were you before that? Anything fun?"

"Oh, I travelled a bit," she replies vaguely, "Spent some time in the East, and then in Italy and Northern Africa. But nothing really made me want to stay anywhere for long, so I ended up back here."

Fred nods as she says this, and is about to ask another question when suddenly a man bursts in through the door.

"Weasley, quick," he pants out, hurrying across the room and dropping a great stack of papers onto Fred's desk, "These have to be in by noon and they're going to take hours and –"

"Calm down, Finnigan," Fred says easily, getting to his feet and offering the man a glass of water, "What's the issue with these papers? Why noon?"

By the time Finnigan has finished explaining Aria has slipped off to get back to work and it takes all of Fred's willpower not to go out to 'check on the department' and inconspicuously ogle her.

;;

He asks her for lunch that day, and it becomes a regular thing, and he finds that she's so easy to talk to he's almost pouring out his life story, but that's okay because she's doing the same, finally disarmed by his kindness, and they end up kind of like friends, hanging out together after work and laughing over stupid things and teasing each other and gossiping about their other friends.

"You hear about Finnigan and Richards?" she inquires of him one evening when they're sprawled out in her flat in front of her television, her head in his lap and both of them half-asleep after their meal of Chinese take-away.

"What about them?" Fred replies, taking a gulp of his beer, and she twists her head to look up at him and winks, putting on a stage whisper.

"They have been _canoodling_," and here her voice drops a couple of octaves, "in cupboards at the Ministry. Word is they're living together now. How long d'you reckon before he pops the question?"

"Too long," Fred decides eventually, unable to stop the spark that leaps right through him as she rolls over to pick her beer up off the floor, her hand brushing against his thigh, because she's still beautiful and he's still as hopelessly in love with her as ever, even if they are friends now.

"Men," she sighs when she's got her beer, swinging to sit upright and take a mouthful, swallowing suddenly when he pokes her in the side, grinning.

"Watch what you're saying, Matthews," he warns, and she giggles and pushes him away playfully, smacking him hard in the arm to get him to stop tickling her.

That night, she falls asleep on his couch and he carries her through to his bed and tucks her in and lets his control slip for long enough to reach down and press a kiss to her forehead. She wakes up, but not properly, and with a few mumbled commands he finds himself press-ganged into clambering into the bed next to her.

"Are you sure –" he begins, but she cuts him off by snuggling up against him, already nearly asleep again.

"Bed's too big to be alone in it," she murmurs sleepily, words messy with her tiredness, her face against his chest. And then her breathing is evening out and Fred doesn't even bother to argue, just strokes her hand and lets his fingers wander over the planes of her face, liking the sharp contrast of her palepale skin against his coffee-colour.

He falls asleep easily, with her there beside him, and when he wakes up the next morning and finds her already awake, staring up at him with her blue eyes wide and thoughtful, her brow adorably furrowed, he barely even thinks about it before he reaches down and kisses her, slowly and languorously, his hands tangling around her under the sheets.

She kisses him back with alacrity, and when he pulls back to take a moment to not believe his luck and to realise that, finallyfinallyfinally, she's his (she's _his_), she smiles lazily up at him and raises an eyebrow.

"Took you long enough," she tells him, and he just grins and kisses her again, flipping them over neatly and wondering why he didn't just do this first.

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**a/n**: If you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	4. albus

**a/n**: so I really do love writing Al and Chloe, and I've just realised that I've never actually written the way they meet before. I usually just write them already together. How exciting.

Dedicated to Vanity Sinning and echoing noise for being so touchingly excited about this. I hope I've done Albus justice, you guys!

With the song: _You Are All I Have_ by Snow Patrol.

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_Life is full of beauty. Notice it. _(- Ashley Smith)

* * *

she breathes  
**AlbusChloe**

we'll watch the buildings turn to dust  
a sky of diamonds just for us  
_- I'll Hold My Breath, Ellie Goulding_

_

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_

She wakes him up at three o' clock in the morning, stumbling into his bedroom and slurring her vowels as she flops down onto his bed.

"What the fuck?" he mumbles sleepily, surfacing from under his duvet to find his little sister's best friend sprawled out on top of his covers, taking up one whole side of the bed, her blonde hair a clouded golden mess against his scarlet Gryffindor bedclothes and her pyjamas far too big for her.

"Lilysemmewayfoteb," she informs him in a garbled mess, rolling over with what seems to be a great effort, evidently finding herself closer to his face than she'd expected because she jerks backwards and disappears off the side of the bed with a squeak.

"Shit," Al says in surprise, this whole thing beginning to take a turn for the surreal, "Are you okay? Chloe?"

Her head appears, and she's not even blushing as she clambers back onto the bed. She's persistent, he has to give her that.

"What are you doing in here?" he asks more firmly this time, moving carefully away from her, because this is just too weird and she's sixteen and she's his little sisters best friend and she's in his bed and, wow, this would make a great social experiment.

Her words are slightly more understandable this time, and she's blinking as though it is a great effort to keep her eyes open as she explains, "Lily semmeaway, 'cause she has t' talk t' Teddy."

She gets a bit muddled with all the 't's at the end of her sentence, and Al sighs and gives up as she burrows into his pillows. For all he knows this is just a dream and he'll wake up soon to find himself all nice and alone in his big bed, with no irritating sixteen-year-old girl next to him.

"If you kick me, you're out, you got it?" he informs her. All he gets in response is a yawn, so he rolls his eyes and turns over, pulling the duvet with him and shutting his eyes to go back to sleep.

;;

The next morning he wakes up and finds himself entangled with Chloe, their legs jumbled up together and his arms around her, her head on his chest and her hair tickling his nose.

The first thing he does is sneeze.

"Holy fuck!" she exclaims, leaping away from him as if scalded, instantly and irrevocably awake, "What the fuck are you doing?"

"What the fuck am I doing?" he howls incredulously, "What the fuck are _you _doing? You got into my bed! At three am!"

She falls silent for a moment as she considers this, and then realisation dawns, "Oh."

"Yeah, oh," he replies sourly, flopping back down onto his pillows and glaring at her, "And you kicked me about eight times."

She fights her way out from under his duvet, pushing the collar of her too-big pyjamas back up over one slim shoulder, and glares right back at him.

"Yeah, well, your room is closest to Lily's. I didn't know you were going to go all snuggly on me."

"Go away," he pleads, not even bothering to dignify this last with a response – Albus Potter does not _do _'snuggly' – and schooling his expression into one of begging, "Please. I'll do anything."

"I was going anyway," she retorts, and he rolls his eyes and sighs in exasperation and pulls his duvet back over his head.

"Well then go quicker," he commands, listening with deep relief to the sound of her footsteps retreating, and then wincing as she slams the door. But then peace reigns, and he breathes a thankful sigh as he shuts his eyes to go back to sleep.

Something about the scent of her hair plagues his dreams for the rest of the summer.

;;

At Christmas he's sent to pick Lily up from the Hogwarts Express because his parents are both working and James is away in Italy, so he clatters their battered old Muggle car to King's Cross and goes to wait on the platform, watching the families around him and the small children running around and getting underfoot, and he finds himself wondering what it would be like to have a family all his own.

But then he's nearly bowled over as the train pulls up and students spill out, Lily right at the front of the melee, clearly not anywhere near as exhausted by a full term of Sixth Year as she should be.

"Al!" she screeches, clattering right into him, Slytherin scarf slightly askew and hair all rumpled where she's evidently been asleep on it, "How goes it, fair brother o' mine?"

"Bloody hell, Lils," he replies, prising her off him and holding her out at arms length, trying to get his breath back, "How much coffee did you have on the train?"

"None, actually," a voice announces from behind her, and Al looks up over his sister's head to find Chloe bounding towards him, wearing a Slytherin green-and-silver jumper, with four lovelorn-looking boys trailing along behind her, carrying hers and Lily's trunks, "I wouldn't let her have any. This is all just adrenaline."

"Because it's _Christmas_, Al!" Lily adds, as though he couldn't possibly have been aware of this beforehand, "It's _Christmas_!"

"But she somehow got at the firewhiskey, right?" Al begs of Chloe, who just shakes her head and grins. He groans heavily, "Oh, Merlin, this means she might just be like this all holiday."

"I'm standing right here, you know," Lily informs him icily, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her neck and folding her arms, "And, for your information, _Albus_, I have every intention of being like this all holiday. What with you moping around girlfriendless and James all lovesick for Jenny while she's away with her family, _someone _has to keep up the Christmas cheer."

Al just rolls his eyes and orders them to take their trunks off the poor boys, and then leads the way to the car, trying to ignore their giggles and praying that they'll calm down, at least slightly, for the rest of the holiday.

;;

They don't calm down, and Al starts getting used to hearing pounding feet racing up and down the upstairs corridor doing Merlin knows what, usually accompanied by shrieks or laughter, and learns to tune out teenage girl talk better than he ever has before as they natter incessantly about Christmas and everything else they can think of.

"So don't you have a home of your own to go to?" he inquires of Chloe one night when they're all sprawled out in front of the television, one of the only Muggle devices that Harry and Ginny have got around to purchasing.

"My parents are in Hungary," she replies without a hint that this bothers her, barely even tearing her eyes away from the sitcom currently playing, "And Seb's staying with Soleus."

"Ah," Albus says, and then that seems to be the end of the conversation because she blinks and frowns and concentrates ever-harder on the television.

;;

On Christmas Eve, he's sitting on his windowsill feeling the rest of the house so silent and asleep all around him, unable to sleep, trying to be logical about the way his heart speeds up every time Chloe walks in the room and the way he's still dreaming about the scent of her hair and her legs tangled in his. Problem is, logic is a Slytherin or a Ravenclaw thing, and Al's always been Gryffindor right the way through to his core, so it's not going too well for him.

He jumps as he hears footsteps on the landing outside his bedroom door, and when he crosses the room to see who could possibly be awake at one o' clock in the morning he sees a flash of Lily's red hair disappearing downstairs, and he's about to go after her when he's being hustled back into his own room by someone blonde and deceptively strong, both of them swearing as they struggle against each other.

"For fuck's sake, Al," Chloe complains mightily once she's fought him back into his bedroom, pushing the door gently shut behind herself, leaning against it with her chest heaving and her legs very long under the shirt she's wearing for pyjamas, "You need to learn to leave well enough alone."

"Where's Lily going?" he demands, folding his arms and trying to concentrate on nothing else but her face.

"To wrap up your present," Chloe retorts instantly, so truthfully he's absolutely certain that she's lying, and he unfolds his arms and is across the room in a second, grasping for the doorhandle, trying to prise it open even as she fights to keep it shut.

"You'll wake up your family!" she hisses at him, back against the door and hands against his t-shirt clad chest as she struggles to keep him in his room, "And then they'll kill all three of us!"

"Then let me _out_," he demands, making another attempt to grab the doorknob. This time his hand slips and he finds himself falling against her, trapping her against the door, her body lithe and warm between himself and the wood.

He doesn't move for precisely three-point-seven-seven seconds, just feeling the rise and fall of her quickening breath against his chest, so soft and desirable – and then he's stumbling backwards, landing heavily on the floor and prompting a shout of, "What was that?" from his parents' room.

"Nothing, Dad!" he calls back hastily, wishing he didn't sound quite so goddamn breathless, "Tripped over my trunk."

There's no further sound, so Al just sits there on his floor, gazing up at Chloe as she leans against the door, one hand on the doorhandle and her cheeks flushed with something that's probably just the heat or whatever.

"Sorry," he mumbles eventually, ducking his head, feeling thoroughly awkward as he examines the finer details of his carpet with extreme interest, "Missed the handle."

"Promise to stay here," she breathes, far more of a command than a plea, and then he's hearing his door being opened and by the time he looks up she's already fleeing, disappearing back into Lily's room and falling totally silent.

He goes back to bed, completely shaken up, and that night he dreams of her body and her smile as well as her hair.

;;

Their eyes keep meeting across the table even at the crowded Burrow when there are infinite family members between him and her, laughter and noise and chatter ringing all about them – just another Christmas among the Weasley family.

As usual, James does something predictably stupid – except, this time, it involves proposing to his girlfriend in front of the whole family. She says no and James flees, devastated and embarrassed, and she's forced to chase after him and tell him it was a dare from Lily and Dominique, of course she'll marry him, how could she not?

Albus can only stand back as the celebrations reach fever pitch, because today isn't just about Christmas, it's about James's newly-engaged status and Victoire's first pregnancy and Lucy's upcoming wedding and usually he'd be at the centre of the rabble, but this time he notices a girl slip away from the party and disappear outside. She's blonde and she's pretty and he's been watching her all day without meaning to, so he follows her outside.

He finds her shivering out on the stone wall at the bottom of the garden and joins her wordlessly, pulling his jumper over his head, ruffling his already-unruly hair further, and hands it to her.

"So here's the thing," he says finally, most definitely _not _looking at her as she takes the jumper from him and puts it on, "That thing last night, with the door and slipping and everything –"

"I'm sorry about that," she interrupts, and now he dares to look at her. Her eyes are wide, her hair messy from putting the jumper on, and he knows she'll never admit it but the Gryffindor scarlet looks really good on her. "I need to stop making a habit of coming into your bedroom at night."

"No you don't," he says before he can stop himself, and less than a second later he's wishing the words back in and blushing a bright, bright red, wondering why he couldn't have been born James and been so much slicker than this.

"Al," she begins, but he cuts her off, jumping down off the wall and landing in the snow.

"Sorry, that was – that was out of line. I, uh… I've just remembered… something I have to do. Yeah. I'll, um, be back… later, or something."

He sets off into the field, ploughing through the snow, and he gets about ten metres before he hears an exasperated snort from behind him and then he's being bowled over suddenly, face down into the snow, a heavy warm weight on top of him.

He rolls over quickly to avoid suffocating, and she moves at the same time so she ends up still on top of him, her hair falling down around his face as she regards him fondly, one freezing hand going up to run through his hair.

"I know I shouldn't say this," she announces, fisting her fingers in his hair suddenly, "Seeing as how you're Lily's brother and all… but, um, I kindofreallylikeyou."

She trails off uncertainly, her last few words a jumbled mush, and Al's having a strange sense of déjà vu as he tries to untangle them. His hands fist in her (his) jumper, right at her hips, the garment so big it hangs almost halfway down her thighs.

"I kind of really like you too," he whispers, and they're both flushing and he's thinking that he's never seen her like this, never seen her as anything other than the uber-confident, Slytherin princess; but then she's leaning down and kissing him gently, almost tentatively, until he responds hungrily and she reacts in kind, pressing him down into the ground fiercely, and he tries to roll them over to gain dominance but she fights and they end up half-wrestling, half-kissing until they're both breathless with laughter and exercise and covered almost head-to-toe in snow.

"I've liked you for ages, you know," she confides in him when they are eventually paused to recuperate, reaching up as he hovers over her to brush her thumb against his cheekbones, "Ever since you let me sleep in your bed."

"For something I should have regretted," he informs her, grinning slightly as he steals another quick kiss, "It didn't make me feel even the tiniest bit remorseful."

She beams at that and wraps her arms tightly around his neck, bringing him crashing down on top of her, not even bothering to check he's alright before carrying on kissing him.

;;

When they re-enter The Burrow later, everyone is too absorbed in the party to notice how soaked and shivering they are, so they rush upstairs and are nearly to the top when Lily comes out of a room and sees them.

"Oh," she says, and that one syllable carries the weight of the world, "Please tell me you two just happened to fall over outside."

"We just happened to fall over outside," Al replies instantly, thanking Merlin he'd let go of Chloe's hand before going inside, raising his eyebrows innocently up at his sister. "Why, what else would we have been up to?"

"Well, okay then," Lily says, fixing a stern glare on Chloe, who just shrugs, grins, and winks. Al rolls his eyes as Lily clambers past them down the stairs. She pauses at the bottom and Al is about to carry on upstairs when suddenly Lily's bellowed "OI!" stops him in his tracks.

The noise from the ground floor ceases abruptly, and Al watches in a sort of slow-motion horror as Lily takes a deep breath and then, beaming, announces to the room, "Al just snogged Chloe. Finally, in the dim old age of his life, he has found love. Is't not the most romantic of Christmases?"

"I'm _nineteen_," is the only response Al can think of to this, but then there's a sudden uproar from downstairs, cheering and catcalling, and then Chloe's taking his hand with a broad grin and tugging him upstairs. He gives in, straight away, and as they tumble into his bedroom he thinks that maybe he could deal with spending every Christmas with her, with having her as all he has.

Even if she does kick him in her sleep.

* * *

**a/n: **If you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	5. rose

**a/n**: okay, so I haven't actually written any RoseScorpius pieces recently, which is weird because they were always one of my two favourite Next-Gen pairings. I guess I've drifted away from them recently. But here they are, back again!

The quote I've used for this chapter is, as you can see, where I've taken my title from. I hope this puts a bit more meaning behind the overall title of this collection. The quote, in my own rough translation, means:

"It's the story of a man who's fallen from a fifty-floor building. As he falls past each floor he keeps reassuring himself by saying, 'so far so good, so far so good', and so on. But it's not the fall that matters. It's the landing."

With the song: _Kiss From A Rose_, by Seal.

* * *

_C'est l'histoire d'un hom__me qui tombe d'un immeuble de cinquante étages, le mec au fur et a mesure de sa chute il se répète sans cesse pour se rassurer, « Jusqu'ici tout va bien, jusqu'ici tout va bien »…_

_Mais l'important c'est pas la chute. __C'est l'atterrissage._

(- from La Haine, dir. Mathieu Kassovitz)

* * *

use me for rocketfuel  
**RoseScorpius**

only the faintest glances buries you, buries me,  
so fire your engine, see if i give a damn.  
_- Engines, Snow Patrol_

_

* * *

_

If she's going to be honest, this all started back in fourth year, with –shockhorror- rule-breaking on her part. So there had been this midnight feast, right, because obviously if you're at a boarding school you have to go all Enid Blyton at least once while you're there.

They'd all been sneaking down to the Room of Requirement, bags of sweets and cakes and chocolates, made for them by willing house elves, clutched between fingers trembling with excitement and the possibility of getting caught.

All eight Gryffindor fourth year girls, hair pulled back into ponytails and shivering in their pyjamas, sneaking down corridors and holding back giggles because this – well, this is what the teenage years are all about.

And naturally they'd been having a fantastic time, eating their hearts out and beating each other with pillows and screaming with laughter, hidden within the protective magic of the Room… and then the boys had crashed their party.

Scorpius Malfoy was in the lead, of course, grey eyes glittering and blonde hair dishevelled, beaming as he burst through the door followed by the other fourth year Gryffindor boys, his arrogance streaming from every pore.

"My, my, ladies, why on Earth didn't you invite _us_?"

Rose has mostly ignored him up until this point, because she hates living up to clichés and with her father's warning words on the platform at the beginning of first year, the last thing she ever wanted to do was start a feud with the Malfoy boy. So she lets him be Albus's best friend and nothing more, a vague annoying presence who teases her but can also be charming and gentlemanly.

(The truth is that she's never really managed to get a handle on him, and that's what bothers her most.)

The girls had sort of automatically looked to Rose, their natural leader, and she'd thought for a moment before shrugging and grinning.

"Join us, then, if you want to."

And they had, and at some point during the night Rose had ended up sitting next to Scorpius as they surveyed the feather-littered room, everybody else passed out with exhaustion all entangled together.

"House spirit," Scorpius had commented wryly, and Rose had grinned and yawned and then fallen asleep on his shoulder.

And then they were kind of… friends, or something.

;;

Her dad doesn't approve of her friendship with Scorpius, she knows that much. She deals with that, but soon the snide remarks of the rest of her family start to eat away at her, because okay he's a Gryffindor and they're all for integration, but – really? Rosetheprefectandperfectgirl and Scorpiusthecynicalarse? They just don't match up.

But they and Albus are kind of this little trio of good-natured banter and friendly rivalry and Rose wouldn't change it for the world.

Until Scorpius starts going out with Roxanne, which is not only awkward because Rox is a fifth year when they're seventh years, but also because Roxanne is family and Rose has always hated Scorpius's girlfriends for reasons that she doesn't want to think about, but now she can't because Roxanne is _family_, and probably the sweetest member of their family, too.

"You hurt her, Scorpius Malfoy," Rose threatens him in the common room one night when Roxanne is out with Lily and Dominique somewhere, "You hurt her and I will castrate you so fast you won't even know what's happened until I'm done."

"You've always had this weird obsession with my manly parts, Rose," Scorpius replies with a smirk, lounging back in his chair, winking at her, "Maybe I should be worried?"

"Only if I should be worried about the amount of time you spend staring at my boobs," she parries effortlessly, and at this point Albus rolls his eyes and gets up from the table they're all sitting at, disappearing off up to his dorm, muttering something about being sick of their bickering.

They heckle him from across the room and then return to their argument, and it's easy and effortless, this state of mind, and Rose does her favourite thing in the world and decides not to question it, just go with it.

;;

She's always had a strange fascination with grammar, Rose has. She never admits to it because it would make her too much like her mother, too much like everybody expects, but nevertheless it's there.

As she squares up to Scorpius in a deserted hallway around midnight one January night, she thinks somewhere in the back of her mind that she's jealous of him. You see, there are two different moods, when it comes to language – the Indicative Mood and the Subjunctive Mood.

Scorpius lives in the indicative, the mood of action. He's so damn _sure _of himself, standing there staring down at her, a little hint of regret and fear (and lust, shut up) just sparking in the corners of eyes. But he's still there, facing her down, breathing calm and easy, and maybe nobody else understands why this boy was put in Gryffindor when by all rights he should have been Slytherin, a Ravenclaw maybe at a push. But Rose understands.

Rose has seen the way he leaps to the defence of those that mean the most to him without a second's hesitation. She's bathed his bleeding face when he's fought to protect his father's honour when he hears some kid badmouthing his family. She's heard his furious arguments with his cousin Chloe late at night outside the Portrait Hole when he thinks nobody else is awake, fighting about love and life and other more inconsequential things. She's watched him play Quidditch, blazing and vital and daring. She's seen his temper roused (more often by soft-minded Hufflepuffs than by her) and seen the way he flies off the handle occasionally. Not often, but it does happen.

Whereas she… well, she kind of lives in the subjunctive. The mood of doubt. She wonders every day whether she's going to live up to her parents' hopes, whether she even _wants _to. She wonders whether it's worth carrying on pretending like she knows what she's doing when actually she doesn't have a damn clue. She doubts herself and she doubts her ability to sort her feelings for Scorpius out most of all.

"I warned you," she says threateningly, wand suddenly at his throat, "I said, if you hurt her."

"I couldn't keep doing it," he says, and behind the wand his eyes are suddenly bright, locked on hers, "It wasn't fair to her or to me."

"Keep doing what?" Rose demands in exasperation, pushing a strand of brown hair irritably out of her eyes, "Stop speaking in bloody riddles."

"And it's not just that I couldn't," he replies, flicking her wand away impatiently, "It's that I _can't_."

"Can't _what_?" Rose near-screams, because this is absurd and Roxie is upstairs crying her eyes out in her dorm with Dominique attempting to console her and promising Scorpius's murder, and when he looks at her like that it's like he's a light burning away the darkness.

"Can't keep substituting girls for you," he says, just like that, matter-of-fact, his eyes still gazing steadily into hers, "Because, let's face it, if you and I hooked up, it would be a disaster. Our parents would hate it, we'd fight _all the time_, Al would probably kill us for making him a third wheel, and we'd be probably the biggest cliché to walk the halls of Hogwarts of all time."

Rose takes a deep breath and tucks her wand away, using the excuse of pushing her hair out of her eyes to look away from him and the intensity in the way he's looking at her.

And even as she's cataloguing his reasoning and trying to deal with how overwhelmingly delighted she is with this revelation, there's something nagging at the back of her mind that reminds her that the subjunctive might be the mood of doubt, but it's also the mood of _possibility_.

So she damns herself, damns the both of them, and she reaches up and drags him into a kiss, feeling his strong lean body against hers, his mouth moving against hers as they kiss, both breathing harshly and raggedly, neither of them saying a word as his arms move to secure her against him. And it's like these last three years have been a free-fall of desperate denial and lying to themselves, and this kiss is the landing, their final moment of truth.

They aren't Ravenclaws to overthink things, after all. They're Gryffindors, led ultimately by their hearts, and it's a known fact that Gryffindors' hearts often lead them into battle. And this… this whatever-it's-turned-into, friends-to-romance, this is most definitely going to be a battle.

But Gryffindors aren't the giving up type, either, whether they're subjunctive or indicative or a fiery mix of the two.

* * *

**a/**n: if you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	6. lucy

**a/n**: so obviously I usually write LucyLorcan and MollyLysander, but I needed to write a MollyLorcan for some reason so Lucy and Lysander got thrown together sort of by default (because I'm too lazy to switch my list around any more, yo). And then I went to see the musical Chess (because I have a friend called Francesca who we call Chess, and it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss) which was… uh, not the _best _show in the world.

But this song… oh, this song gave me all different types of shivers and it helped me so much in writing this, most particularly the first part. And then the set song for Lucy for this contest really helped me in the second half, so it really was win-win.

With the song: _Have I Told You Lately_ by Rod Stewart.

* * *

"_I think how hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, too, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare to the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare_?" (from The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness.)

* * *

pity the child  
**LucyLysander**

pity the child who knew his parents, saw their faults,  
saw their love die before his eyes.  
_- Pity the Child, Murray Head (from Chess the Musical)  
_

_

* * *

_

The truth is that she's never been one for big displays of emotion. She thrives on detachment, solitude, bottling up her feelings and keeping up a strong façade. She used to be a bubbly little girl who became a bubbly little teenager, bright and strong and cheerful and more inclined to tell the world her every thought rather than keeping them to herself.

But then she turned fifteen and her mother moved out to live with another man (-"I'm sorry, Luce, but I love him. I've loved him so long. I can't be happy here"-) and suddenly there was Lucy, mother of the household, with her heartbroken father and recalcitrant little sister to worry about.

It's funny because their parent's divorce actually gave Molly a turn for the better.

She went through a phase of rebellion aged about fourteen, naturally, where she cut her hair short and always painted her nails black and hero-worshipped Muggle singers. But she always loved her big sister more than anything else in the world – Lucy was the only constant in a world where everything seemed liable to change at any moment, lives torn apart and truths shown to be lies – and so when Lucy sat her down and told her to get her act together, she did, and now she's one of the top of her year group and she's playing Quidditch for Ravenclaw and, well, she looks a shoe-in for Head Girl when she reaches Seventh Year.

But Lucy… well, she had to hold it together, didn't she? She had to be the one who made sure their father was eating and that Molly was behaving herself for the most part. It would have been so easy to call on their large family for help, but Percy's always been chronically against admitting weakness to his siblings or parents and he most definitely instilled that in Lucy. So she battled onwards, and she became this quiet, reserved nineteen-year-old with a weary heart and a cynical view on the world.

;;

She's sitting on the kitchen counter in their house reading a magazine when Lysander Scamander comes in. He's his own little whirlwind, trailing grass stems and mud and laughter.

"Molly home?" he inquires immediately, helping himself to a biscuit out of the jar and cramming it into his mouth. Lucy arches one eyebrow artfully, radiating disapproval.

"No, she's out 'til later."

"Oh, bummer," he replies, and then throws himself into a seat at the kitchen table, knocking over the salt shaker and, unconcerned, beginning to draw pictures in the spilled salt.

"What d'you want her for?" Lucy asks after a long silence that seems slightly uncomfortable from where she's sitting, studying him and the way his unruly fringe falls into his eyes and his broad shoulders and wonderful sensitive mouth.

"Just to hang out," Lysander says easily, abandoning his salt and leaning back in his chair, extending his arms and yawning, his body stretching sinuously in the chair, his t-shirt hem shifting to expose a flash of tawny tanned skin. Lucy averts her eyes quickly before she can be accused of staring – this is Lysander, after all, who she's known since she was born and who's somehow become best friends with Molly, even though he's three years older than her, older even than Lucy (but only by two weeks, as she's always quick to point out).

"You going to stick around, then?" Lucy presses after another pause, still holding that magazine as though she's actually going to keep reading, her eyes trained on him as he yawns again, "Because, I warn you, she won't be back for a couple of hours. You might be better off going and doing something else in the meantime."

"Nah, I'll stay," he says generously, beaming as though he's giving her a gift by doing this, and he regards her from his chair. "So you're just going to sit there and read?"

"S'what I was doing before you interrupted," she points out validly, and he grins and rolls his eyes.

"Right, of course, sorry," he parries instantly, itching his stomach underneath his t-shirt, grinning idly up at her, "I forget that you lead such a wildly exciting life."

"Fuck off, Scamander," she retorts mostly good-naturedly, because there's always been this _something _between them that she can't put a finger on, which is probably for the best, "Like you've ever read a single book cover-to-cover in your whole life."

"I have too," he responds in outrage, hand on heart, looking wounded, "You lie, Lucy Weasley!"

"You _cannot _be serious," she states as he bounds out of his chair towards her, but next thing she knows he's grabbing her off the counter and swinging her around, holding her tightly in his arms, her back up against his broad chest, and she's squealing and giggling like a twelve-year-old as she fights to get away. "Lemme go, you oaf!"

"Not until you take it back!" he demands, his breath hot in her ear and she can just _hear _the smirk in his tone, "Go on, take it back! Admit that you know I've read at least one book in my whole life."

"Never," she vows, and his arms are gratefully loosening and she's almostalmostalmost free – and then suddenly he's _tickling _her. Because, obviously, they're still five years old and settling disputes this way.

And, the issue is, Lucy puts up this toughtoughtough exterior and she's barely smiled in four years, let alone laughed as she's doing now, wild and shrieking, but _sweet Merlin _he _knows _how ticklish she is, and this is just totally unfair.

"Ger…offof…me…you…_prat_!" she demands when she can gasp for air in between laughing, wriggling to get out of his grasp, failing dismally, her knees giving way so she sinks to the floor and still he keeps on tickling her.

"Admit it!" he commands yet again, kneeling beside her so he can keep tickling as she writhes there on the floor, helpless with laughter, trying to get away but too weak and breathless.

"No," she retorts yet again, and she's almost made it out of reach of those naturalist's fingers that know all her weak spots as well as they know how to soothe injured creatures, but then suddenly he's pinning her and she's having flashbacks to when they were six and used to wrestle like this, except suddenly he's a lot heavier and his knees are on either side of her thighs and his expression is somehow much less but just as innocent as it was all those years ago.

"_Admit it_," he repeats, bending low to whisper it into her ear, his chest lowering to almost touch her heaving one as his fingers continue their merciless torture, "Go on, Lucy, you know you want to."

"Fine, fine!" she exclaims eventually, damn near asphyxiation, "I believe that you've read a book cover-to-cover at least once in your life."

"Good girl," he compliments, and then abruptly he's moving away from her, clambering to his feet and pushing his hair off his face, extending a hand down towards her as she lies there.

She accepts it in surprise, feeling him haul her to her feet, and then he's off with all of his usual vigour, stealing another biscuit from the jar and then hopping out through the open window even though the door is right next to it.

She follows him out, unable to believe that he can go from so close and so intimate to all wrapped up in his own little world again, like he's flicking a switch.

"Hurry up, Luce," he calls over his shoulder, and she exits the house with one eyebrow raised, blonde hair catching the sunlight with little shoots of gold, shading her eyes against the brightness and watching as he turns towards her and holds his hand out, "C'mon, let's go down to the river."

;;

They sit on the bank and they kick their bare feet into the current and they talk about everything and nothing. She tells him what it's been like with her mother gone and their father turned into a workaholic. She shares her fears about Molly and her fears for herself and her dreams and hopes and wishes.

And in turn he tells her about a project he's working on with unicorns in Northumbria, and Lucy glances sidelong at him, eyes turned hazelly-green by the reflection of the water, and it's like she's seeing him anew as he gesticulates, a far-off look in his eye and his mouth grinning almost unconsciously.

"You're so enthusiastic," she wonders, breaking into his rambling, and he pauses and tilts his head at her.

"What d'you mean?"

"I mean," she says, and she's thinking that maybe she's not making any sense at all, "You just… see everything that could go right. It's so… nice. To see for me, I mean."

"Y'know," he says, nudging her shoulder gently with his, "You could try it sometime. Seeing the things that could go right instead of the things that could go wrong."

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" she replies primly, with a slight smile, and then shrieks when he rolls his eyes and gives her an almighty shove into the water.

She erupts out and grabs on around his neck, tugging him in with her until they're laughing and splashing each other and this, right here, _this is living._

;;

They wander back into her house and Molly's still absent, but they barely even notice because somehow her hand has migrated into his and it feels as natural as a sunset.

"I had fun today," he says, and he doesn't sound nearly as surprised as she thought he might.

"Me too," she replies with a smile, turning to face him. He brushes a strand of wet hair off her face, watching his own fingers with an intense sort of concentration, and then he meets her eyes half-nervously.

"You know," he begins, and there's a vague tremor in his voice. He swallows and seems to master it, "I've kind of wanted to do this for a really long time."

And then he kisses her, and the term 'fireworks' doesn't even begin to cover it.

;;

They move to the city and they get married and there are mornings when they like to just lie in bed together and feel the sun creep over the sill of their wide window, high above the city in their apartment, his arms around her waist and his lips on her neck and her laughter in his heart.

"You know you're everything, right?" he asks her one morning as though it has just occurred to him to pose the question, "Because I don't think I've told you recently. How much I love you, I mean."

"You told me last night," she tells him, rolling over in his embrace and smiling up at him, "But it's always nice to hear it again."

"You just… make everything else not matter very much," he tells her with a small smile, lips pulled up at the corners, "No matter how sad I am, you always make it better."

"Ditto," she replies, and then she reaches up and kisses him and it's amazing because that feeling, from their first kiss – well, that's never gone away and as he rolls them over neatly she laughs against his mouth and thinks that, with him, nothing could ever make that feeling go away.

* * *

**a/n**: If you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	7. roxanne

**a/n**: so it's been a while. The usual excuse of school is my only defence. Plus I think one of my friends is about four emails from starting an affair with her maths teacher, so I'm trying to talk her out of that. On the bright side, it would mean she'd stop mooning over Natalie Portman.

Although, on the bright side, I think I used the song better this time?

Song: _This Love_, Maroon 5.

* * *

_Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos. _- Snoopy_  
_

* * *

goodbye too many times  
**RoxanneAlfie**

her heart is breaking in front of me  
but i have no choice, 'cause i won't say goodbye any more  
_- This Love, Maroon 5_

_

* * *

_

Their relationship has always been about goodbyes, which is a shame because they're perfect in every other way. She's the sweet Weasley, the kind Weasley, who wants so hard to please everybody and usually succeeds. She's the diplomat and the peacemaker and you'd think she belonged in Hufflepuff if you didn't see the fearless way she wades into family arguments.

And he's bright and he's snarky and he talks too fast to keep up with, but around her he's _nice_. He'll do anything for her, anyone can see that.

Anything but stay.

They say goodbye for the holidays, goodbye when they're finally done with school. They meet again, a few years on, reunite, rekindle the romance. And then they say goodbye every morning when he goes to work on the other side of the country and she goes to work three streets across from their flat.

"D'you love me?" she asks one evening, and he grins across at her and pops the top off his beer and rolls his eyes.

"Of course I love you, stupid," he replies as though this is the most obvious thing in the world, like she's asked whether or not the sun is hot, "I should think that was obvious."

She smiles down into her lap and her hair obscures her face and the next morning he's saying goodbye again, to jet to America for a business meeting.

You see, he might be a wizard with a wand and a strange and terrible power contained within him – but before he knew he was a wizard he wanted to go into business, and after he knew he was a wizard he wanted to go into business. And so he went into business, and if he uses Felix Felicis potions every now and again – well, it's not like he's doing anything technically illegal, just happening to bump into the right people at the right time, right?

;;

"So how's it going?" she inquires when she's on the phone to him one night, lying on their bed with the telephone cord wrapped around her fingers and her eyes tracing the lines of the stars outside the window, "Remind me what this trip's about again?"

"We're looking for investors," he replies, and through the telephone line his voice is a little distracted, "Sean's still here, we're going through the paperwork."

"Oh, if you're busy, I can –"

"No, stay," he says quickly, hopefully, and it's ironic because the only time they can never seem to say goodbye is when they're continents apart, "I like hearing your voice. How are you? How's your family?"

"Oh, my family are my family," Roxanne replies, sighing and not bothering to repress the grin because there's nobody here to see that she's amused by the crazy politics, "Uncle Harry nearly had an aneurysm the other day because Lily finally plucked up the courage to tell him that she's pregnant. I mean, the girl's twenty-five, he should have been expecting it by now."

"She's pregnant already?" he says, sounding surprised, "She's been married – what, two years now?"

"Yeah, but," Roxanne combats easily, "She's belonged with Teddy so much longer. Really it's like they've been married six years."

"I don't think that's proper maths," he informs her, and she can hear the smile in his voice so she tells him to shush and their conversation continues, easy give-and-take, and they don't say goodbye at the end, just 'I love you'.

;;

He takes her on holiday to Rome and they laugh together and eat together and do everything together, and for two weeks there are no goodbyes, none at all, and it's so easy she might just die from the pleasure.

Then he takes her to the beach, and her already-dark skin gets even darker from the sunshine, and he burns bright red like a tomato, a vibrant contrast against his brown hair and blue eyes, and she laughs at him but spends an hour the same evening rubbing soothing lotions into his agonising skin.

"You're an idiot," she tells him softly, pressing a kiss to his neck.

"Hey, let's not forget who's the Ravenclaw here," he teases, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her firmly, despite the sunburn, and she giggles as he rolls her down onto the bed, her smile brightbrightbright against her tan.

;;

They say goodbye again two days after getting home, when she goes off to look after her cousin Victoire's two daughters, Lo and Clare, while Victoire and her husband Matthew head off to the Caribbean for some much needed peace and quiet.

She stays for a week until she is relieved by Dominique, and when she returns home she's pensive and subdued and when he gets home from work he starts to worry about her immediately.

"What's the matter?" he asks, pausing in the doorway to the sitting room and finding her just… sitting. Sitting and not reading or writing or watching the television he'd had to sneak past her grandfather for fear of it being taken apart and pieced back together, probably wrongly. Just sitting.

"Nothing," she replies, blinking and turning her head to smile at him as if waking from a dream, "Just thinking about the kids. Lo and Clare, I mean. It'd be nice to have them all to myself, like, permanently. Only I wouldn't want to deprive Vic and Matthew. It's just… I dunno."

He reads between the lines, like he always can with her.

"I'm not sure now's a great time to be thinking about kids, Rox," he says carefully, "With my work taking me all over the place – and you couldn't get out of work so easily, right? And we're not even married yet, so –"

"I know," she interrupts, and she won't look at him and this bothers him more than he can say, "It was just… don't even worry about it. I'm being stupid."

"No you're not," he promises, crossing the room and dropping onto the sofa next to her, pressing a kiss to her temple, "You're not at all."

She looks up at him, then, hopeful and desperate and so he kisses her on the mouth, hard and determined and claiming, and he doesn't add the unspoken sentence that maybe if they weren't always saying goodbye then a kid might be a good – maybe a brilliant – idea.

;;

They say goodbye finally one sunny October morning, when there's a bit of a chill in the air. There's been a row, a blazing row, and it's the first time he's ever seen her really furiously angry. She throws things at him and he knocks them away with his wand and eventually she screams at him to get out, to just get out.

It's been building up all summer, he reflects as he stands on his brother's doorway in the pouring rain, waiting for the door to be answered. Building since that week where she decided she wanted a child and he had to tell her that it wasn't practical.

And now there's been an explosion and he thinks he might have broken her heart, throwing all those goodbyes of the past forever in her face in one furious outburst and then disappearing out of her life.

As the rain drips down his collar and dampens his shirt he muses that maybe they could have been a really epic love story, if only they'd exchanged some of those goodbyes for hellos. Maybe if he'd just said yes to having a child, maybe if he'd proposed or… anything. Anything at all.

;;

They bump into each other a year later at a wedding (one of her cousins, he suspects, but he can't really remember). They end up sitting next to each other at the reception dinner and then they dance all night and the next morning he wakes up in her (their) flat in bed next to her and he thinks that maybe fate's just got them running around in circles.

That morning he wakes her up and he says, "Hello", and she smiles up at him and she says, "Hello yourself". And then he kisses her and whispers his love over the sound of the city outside the window, and they promise that there'll be no more goodbyes.

* * *

**a/n**: If you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	8. dominique

**a/n**: just realised how little time I have left to get these done... aaaahh!

With the song: Run by Snow Patrol, which coincidentally is one of my all-time favourite songs. Snow Patrol is always win, no matter what.

* * *

i hear neverland is nice at this time of year**  
DominiqueSebastian**

see how i'll leave with every piece of you  
don't underestimate the things that i will do.  
_- Rolling In The Deep, Adele_

_

* * *

_

Because they've always been something, no matter how much she tries to deny it. And she's Dominique fucking Weasley, if you please, and she's not going to feel like this for a boy like him.

;;

He was always the golden boy, the smart Slytherin with the silver tongue and the handsome face and that way of making every waking second a dream.

It's sort of cruel, she muses sometimes, that he could be so beautiful and yet so hateful. Like a snake in nightingale's clothing, or something equally poetic that sounds melodramatic no matter which way you put it.

All though school, somehow he was the one who always found her when she was upset or angry about something. And usually he'd manipulate her into a fight and she never realised until afterwards but at least the fights distracted her from her worries.

So it's a natural thing, she supposes, that he should be the one to find her the morning that she's curled up in the bathroom at The Burrow with her face against her knees and her breathing ragged and torn.

"Weasley," he acknowledges, and she recognises his tone instantly and that should say something (but it fucking doesn't, okay?) and she won't look at him.

"Go away."

"C'mon, you don't mean that," he needles, and the floorboards creak next to her head and his shadow falls over her as he crouches down beside her, and at twenty-two shouldn't they be past this already? "You love me really."

"I hate you," she tells him, her voice muffled past her knees, and there's more creaking and she cracks one tear-filled eye open to discover him sitting with his back against the bathtub, regarding her with an inscrutable expression.

"I hate you too," he replies, and suddenly she's sitting up too and leaning her back against the wall and gazing right at him, their eyes meeting firmly and unflinchingly.

"Why are you here, then?" she inquires, and he makes no reply as his eyes rake over her and when he finally returns his gaze to her face he looks torn somewhere between amusement and disappointment.

"You cut your hair."

She tugs on one short strand of hair, winding her forefinger in a loose curl and shrugging, "Yeah. You don't care."

"Right, right," he agrees, tilting his head back against the wall, and really they'd be really quite a sight if they could get along – she with her pretty stormy grey eyes and deep red hair, and he with his mocking blue gaze and just-a-little-too-long brown hair.

"I did it for Molly," she explains eventually, when the silence has stretched unbearably and it's a little odd because for two people that are so incapable of getting along, they're very good at just sitting and being, silently and together, "She was upset about her hair not growing back out, so I wanted to show her that short hair is good."

"I preferred it before," he informs her, as cuttingly blunt as usual, "You look kind of like a child now."

"Didn't know you'd even formed an opinion on my hair," she replies lightly, not particularly in the mood to argue today, brushing a stray tear away and sniffing, "I suppose usually you're too busy being an arsehole to check out my appearance."

"Why are you crying?"

The abrupt change of topic takes her somewhat by surprise, but after all they're twenty-two and they've known each other all this time and really all their conversations run in circles.

"Don't even try to pretend to care," she replies in a weary tone, letting her head fall back against the wall so she's staring up at the cracked ceiling, "You might have everyone else fooled, but I can always tell when you're lying."

"But can you tell when I'm telling the truth?" he inquires with an inclination of his head and a little smirk, always so bloody self-satisfied, "Because I'm telling the truth now. I do want to know why you're crying. It's weird that you're upset and I'm not the cause."

"You never make me upset," she hastens to correct, head snapping down so she can scowl at him, "Just angry. There's a clear difference."

"Tell me, Dominique" he repeats, and maybe she shouldn't notice that he's used her first name for the first time, but she does and that's that.

"I'm lonely," and there she's said it, it's out in the world and no matter how hard she wishes it in it's never going to be unsaid, not ever.

He gazes back at her steadily, and there's not even a hint of mockery in his expression as he tilts his head curiously, "But you've got your whole family. And all the others that hang around with them. Plus your friends – hello, Chloe? She might be _my _twin, but she spends far more time with you and Lily than she spends with me."

"'Cause you're an arse," she responds out of habit, but there's no real fire and in fact she's so unconvincing that suddenly he's scrambling across the room and collapsing to sit next to her, his foot just bumping gently against hers.

"Why are you lonely?"

"Have you ever considered that it's entirely possible to get completely lost in the middle of a crowd?" she asks softly, pensively, like it's an idea that she's been mulling over for some time. And she has, kind of, although never deliberately. It just lurks in the back of her mind – because, yes, she's most definitely on the outgoing side of the spectrum, no doubt about it, and she knows more Muggle cursewords than anybody else she knows (and likes to demonstrate the extent of her vocabulary) and she's good at drawing attention and, oh, there's that thing about being part-Veela, right?

She sighs and risks a glance at him to find him staring into the middle-distance, and she snorts internally for her own stupidity. Of course he's never considered it. He's Sebastian Nott and people _notice _him. He has no sea of Weasleys to get lost amongst.

"Sometimes…" he begins, and then he cuts himself off and his eyes meet hers and he appears to draw courage from somewhere, taking a deep breath and continuing, "Sometimes I think about all the things I've done so far, you know? Wonder about them and what I was thinking. And, you know, I think the only thing I've done right is meeting you."

He breaks the contact first, and she can't even speak, can't find the words to say a thing. He seems to understand, dropping his head back against the wall in a mimicry of her earlier position, his fingers creeping towards hers on the ground between them until they meet, uncertainly and wantingly.

She's left staring at the side of his face, unable to comprehend this. Because the fact that they hate each other is one of the utter basics, a law of nature that can't be broken because otherwise everything else will tumble down with it.

"But – but…" she trails off helplessly, and quite of their own accord her hand is slipping into his and she stares down at their interlaced fingers uncomprehendingly, "You've always been so horrible."

"I don't believe in loving people," he confesses, apparently talking to the ceiling, "Loving people means having to say goodbye."

She falls silent to ponder this for a moment, making no move to increase contact between them, and there's an awful lot of possibility on the air as she says, "You don't always have to say goodbye. You can run away together instead."

"But you're a really slow runner," he reminds her, his eyes moving down to meet hers, his free hand rising and his body twisting so he can toy with the short ends of her hair, "Remember all those times you tried to catch me to hex me?"

She rolls her eyes and feels the burn coming off his skin and as he draws circles against her cheek she just looks at him.

"It was never supposed to be you. Who made me feel like this, you know? If it was going to be anyone who managed to make me care this much, it was never supposed to be you."

"Charmed," he replies, that smirk creeping back, and she just shakes her head at him for what feels like the millionth time, "But... it is me?"

She doesn't reply to that, but she squeezes his fingers and it's funny because they scream at each other so often, you never really realise how good they are at saying a lot without saying anything at all.

* * *

**a/n**: if you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	9. hugo

**a/n**: I'm oddly pleased with this one. It lets me explore my personal canon of having Hugo in a world-famous Muggle band, which I don't do much but always enjoy.

With the song: Mr Brightside by The Killers.

* * *

"_When darkness comes and pain is all around, like a bridge over trouble water, I will lay me down._" (- from Bridge Over Troubled Water, by Paul Simon)

* * *

boy on repeat  
**HugoAnne**

open up my eager eyes,  
'cause i'm mr brightside.  
_- Mr Brightside, The Killers_

_

* * *

_

He's been in love with her since – oh, forever. She's a gorgeous little thing, all blonde hair-wide smiles-pretty eyes and from the moment he met her he never had a chance.

It's the tiniest little bit pathetic because, hello, he's Hugo Weasley and he's been famous since the first time the world heard his voice on its radios and fell in love. He picked up a guitar when he was seven and he spent his whole childhood hidden in the shadow of his famous family, his foot tapping out melodies and his voice sounding from behind closed doors as his fingers stretched out over chords, moulding the music to his will.

And then he left Hogwarts after a quiet period of education and got a flat in a non-magical part of London. He met four guys with big dreams and two years later they exploded onto the Muggle music scene brighter than supernovas, dominating the charts and combining an impossible appeal with meaningful music that touched anybody who heard it.

They're sort of a miracle, actually, because in a world overshadowed by baby popstars with autotune and more hair stylists than friends, they've managed to become pin-ups and style icons, and yet nobody can dispute that their music is raw and passionate and entirely full of reality.

He met her at a party, the way boys and girls so often meet. He caught her eye across the dancefloor and she smiled and, just like that, he was gone. He plucked up the nerve to approach her after three drinks, shy inside his leather jacket and trying to hide behind his fame.

Her smile brightened and she danced with him all night and he couldn't believe his luck.

And since then she's been – well, everything. Morning and evening and the muse for all his songs and the reason he sings and, god, all the clichés in the book. She tells him that she loves him and kisses his cheek and her hands are fire and, heavens, for a Muggle girl she's just plain _magical_.

"Where're you going?" he inquires groggily of her one morning a couple of weeks after his twenty-third birthday, hungover from the night before celebrating the band's second album going platinum, "It's only six am."

She leans over to drop a kiss onto his forehead, her hair dropping down to tickle his face, and pulls back with a small smile, "I've got work soon, and I need to stop off at Mary's on the way. I'll see you this afternoon."

"'Kay," he replies, stealing a quick kiss and then watching her leave with a blissful smile.

He pretends he doesn't hear her pick up the phone and croon, "Hey, baby. Yeah, I'm just leaving. Told him I was stopping at Mary's."

After all, after music the thing he's best at is denial.

;;

She goes out again that evening, ostensibly for a "girl's-night-in". He watches her leave, forehead pressed against his floor-to-ceiling sitting room window, the London lights spread out before him like a rebel host bearing torches. He watches the man get out of the taxi idling below and gather her up to him, spinning her around and earning laughter that Hugo can't hear from twenty floors up.

Jealousy rises hot and thick inside him – because, for _Merlin's sake_, he's Hugo Weasley and he's the lead singer of Catacomb and _he will not be this guy_. He moves away from the window, images of the pair of them playing through his mind, and he gets a beer from the fridge and as it sits perspiring on his coffee table he sits with his back against the window and his guitar on his knees and sheet music carpeting his floor.

She returns at midnight with a lovebite on her neck and finds him fast asleep with empty beer bottles clinking dolefully around him, sheet music stuck all over the walls and windows.

"Hugo," she says, bending down to where he's passed out on the floor, giving him a gentle shake, "I'm home, honey."

"Go 'way," he mumbles, rousing, his face pressed into the carpet, "Seriously, Anne. Go away."

"But, Hugo," she protests, and when he sits up and rubs his eyes he can smell the stale cigarette smoke coming off her (-"I hate smoking, Hugo, it's so gross. I used to do it just to impress boys I really liked. I'm glad I don't have to with you"-) and it sort of makes him want to cry.

"Get out," he repeats, and she shakes her head mutinously and then somehow he's on his feet, screaming, "_Get out_!" at her, expression wild and eyes filling with tears.

"I love you, I love you," she's pleading, and she's crying outright as he tries to hustle her over to the door, so desperate not to see her face ever again for fear of this pain settling in his chest never going away, "Please, Hugo, you know I love you."

"No, Anne," he says icily, wrestling the front door open and pushing her out into the hallway, not caring what the neighbours think, "That's just the problem. I know you _don't_."

"You promised me everything," she whispers, the tearstains on her cheeks glittering in the bright lights, "You promised."

"You promised not to break my heart," he retorts shortly, and then he's slamming the door in her face and sinking down, head against his knees, wishing and wishing he could go back to ignorance.

;;

The song "The Girl of Broken Promises" goes straight to number one but the band can't get Hugo to celebrate. He stays in his flat and when he does go out he's totally destructive, either lashing out at anybody who tries to talk to him or retreating into a shell of silence, cradling a beer and glowering at the rest of humanity.

"Pull yourself together, man," Mark-the-drummer demands one afternoon, the ninth in a row they've spent round at his apartment trying to write a new song, "This is getting ridiculous. We need a song by next Wednesday."

"Fuck the song," Hugo replies boredly, rubbing his chest absently with one hand, "Fuck everything."

"She's just a girl, man," Colin reminds him sympathetically, "And a bitchy one at that."

"I love her," Hugo responds simply, and then he gets up and disappears into his bedroom and refuses to come out for anything.

The band get desperate, and do the only thing they can think of, skimming through the contacts in his phone until they find the one they need. They dial and the phone rings five times before a girl's voice picks up.

"Hugo?"

"Actually, this is Mark, a friend of Hugo's. We need your help. Please."

;;

When the knock at the door sounds twenty minutes later the keyboardist, Jack, leaps to get the door before Mark, wrenching it open and beaming at the girl standing with a bored expression.

"Lily!" he exclaims, and she just rolls her eyes and pushes past him – Jack's crush is completely old news by now – and marches into the sitting room.

"Where is he?" she demands of the three other guys in the room, reaching up to secure her red hair into a messy bun, nodding her thanks when they indicate Hugo's closed bedroom door.

She strides up to it and, with two small pale fists, sets about beating at it as hard as she can.

"Go away!" a voice calls from inside, and Lily just smiles grimly and pounds harder.

"_What_?" Hugo eventually demands, yanking his door open with enough force to nearly tear it from its hinges, faltering slightly when he sees Lily.

"Let me in," she demands, hands planted on hips, and Hugo musters up his courage and glares at her.

"No. Go away. I don't want to talk to you."

"Since when have you _ever _been the one who decides whether or not we talk?" Lily demands, and then she's striding inside, giving him a shove to get him into the room, and the four men in the sitting room settle back onto their sofas in an uneasy silence, wanting to be confident that Lily will sort Hugo out, but not really able to be.

Thirty minutes later the door flies open and Lily reappears, looking pleased with herself, and leaves with a quick "Bye!" and a wave over her shoulder. Jack springs to his feet to walk her out, disappearing out of the front door and ignoring her exasperated expression.

The three leftover guys all turn simultaneously back to the door to Hugo's room, and their faces are wary when he appears, cup of coffee clutched in one hand and a painful-looking bruise just peeking out from under the sleeve of his t-shirt.

"So I've been a dick," he says eventually, not meeting their eyes, "And I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken it out on you guys."

They exchange glances and then they're beaming and all shouting at him at once, rushing up to slap his back and making fun of his blush and demanding that he go out that evening and get laid and improve his mood.

"We've got a song to write first," he reminds them firmly, and he picks up his guitar from its spot leaning against the wall and finds his usual place on the sofa and starts strumming idly, looking through piles of sheet music as the other guys rearrange themselves around him, the band back in balance, Mark tapping drumsticks against the coffee table absently as they talk it through.

;;

"Mistakes Not To Be Repeated" stays at number one for six weeks, and at an after-party for the Grammys Hugo, clutching an award (Catacomb's third, if anyone's counting), spots a dark-haired girl across the room smiling at him, and after six drinks he summons up the courage to go to talk to her.

After all, he's much better at music than at learning from history.

* * *

**a/n**: if you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	10. lily

**a/n**: so, looking back, I realise that I only meant this to be 1,500 words long maximum.

Awkward.

For my friend **Francesca**, who is 18 tomorrow, March 28th, and who has always been there for me and who is equally as obsessed with Harry Potter as me and is also always late for everything. Chess, you're awesome, and I'm sorry this isn't Daniel Radcliffe.

With the song: Does Your Mother Know? by Abba.

**Warning**: lots of swearing, because the Potter children are incapable of keeping their language clean.

* * *

_See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way. _(- Exodus 23:20)

* * *

even the man in the moon  
**LilyTeddy**

to die by your side  
is such a heavenly way to die.  
- _There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, The Smiths_

_

* * *

_

He breaks her heart on July 16th. It shouldn't be something she remembers with such startling clarity, but she does and there you have it.

She's sitting out in the back garden with him, sixteen years old with her whole head spinning and her breath coming faster just for being near him, hopeless and helpless and hating herself for it.

(She's always tried to be the sort of girl that never feels like this.)

Then he says, very quietly, "I'm marrying Vic. I asked her last week."

And, for the first time in her life, Lily Luna Potter is speechless. She's always been that Slytherin with the tongue quicker than a whip and a wit sharper than a knife, with a smart answer to everything and a snarky joke to deflect any suspicions about what she's really feeling.

But this time she has nothing to say. All she can do is stammer hopelessly, "But… but… I – you… we…"

He knows what she wants to say – he's always known her better than anyone, known the whims of her changeable heart and stubborn opinions and been able to read her flawlessly even when she doesn't know herself what she's feeling.

"I'll still be your best friend, Lils, don't worry," he tells her firmly, and then his arm is dropping around her shoulders and she can't _breathe_, damnit, "I'd never leave you, not for anything."

She wants to scream then, wants to yell until he _understands_ what he's doing by telling her this.

"You're like my sis–"

"Don't say it," she interrupts, in a voice low enough that she hopes it won't break while she's talking, "Don't you dare say that to me."

And then she gets up and walks away, and she doesn't start running until she hits the main road and can't be seen from the house.

;;

She wakes up the next morning with her head against the shoulder of a stranger, a train ticket and a passport clutched tightly in both hands, her wand tucked into the waistband of her jeans and digging into her thigh. She sits up sharply, shaking herself fully awake, and she glances out of the window at the unfamiliar countryside flashing past and then around herself, at the sleeping man next to her and the quiet train carriage.

She takes a moment to remember hailing a taxi to the nearest train station, paying the astonished Muggle with galleons out of the back pocket of her jeans, exchanging more galleons for Muggle money with a spell her Uncle George had taught her years ago in return for her keeping quiet about him playing a certain prank on her Uncle Percy, and then buying a train ticket to Dover. She's always been embarrassingly impulsive for a Slytherin.

She'd train-hopped twice then, keeping moving to stop herself having time to think. She remembers Paris – bright lights, lots of strangers talking in a language she couldn't understand – and then the train that was taking her… somewhere.

She glances down at the ticket in her hands, and raises it to eye level so she can read it in the dim light of the carriage.

_Moscow_.

Well. She's always wanted to visit Russia.

;;

Russia is colder than she anticipated. She draws more galleons out from a local wizarding bank and then exchanges them for more Muggle money, spending that on several thick jumpers and a hotel room for the night.

It's probably a bit conspicuous that she picks the grandest hotel she can find, but she's Lily Potter and she doesn't care if it makes her spoilt to be used to the best.

She stays in Moscow for three days, chatting up a local wizard to get him to cast concealment charms on her so she can't be tracked, and then she sees a boy with hair dyed bright blue and she leaves that same hour.

She goes to Kiev and then onwards, liking the wildness and savagery in the landscape and the quiet resilience of the people. She finds herself in a snowy town somewhere in Nepal with nothing but her passport and a small bag stuffed full of warm clothes and a purseful of money. She scopes out the area and then ducks into the nearest shop. She finds herself confronted with rows and rows of animal furs, and Al's always been the sensitive one in the family so she buys as many as she can and puts most of them on until she's like a walking furball and her distinctive hair is totally hidden under a wolf-fur hood.

She finds a man with a sled and twelve dogs and she manages to understand that he's heading out into the steppes to go home to his little village, and after half an hour she persuades him to take her too.

It's probably stupid, but then she's always had that Gryffindor streak of recklessness that she pretends doesn't exist because it's humiliating for a Slytherin – but, still, it's there and she's already in Nepal, it's not like she can do anything stupider.

;;

The village the man lives in defines 'the middle of nowhere' and as soon as he helps Lily off the sledge she's besieged by curious people, wanting to know where she comes from and speaking hardly any English at all, children jumping at her and dogs barking and it's like being famous.

(Except she already is famous, no matter how she tries to deny it – only daughter of Harry Potter, hello?)

She deflects questions with smiles and soon she's seated on the floor in someone's house, two amazed little girls wrapping her fiery hair around their fingers and cooing in delight, absorbed in the coppery shine of it.

She's fed and she's given a bed just because she's there and Lily falls in love with the place when she awakes the next morning and goes outside to find the whole world a pristine white, nothing moving but for puffs of smoke curling into the air from chimneys.

It's the nearest thing to peace she's ever felt.

;;

She stays with the people there for a month, but then the itch beneath her skin grows again and she starts to get afraid that if she stays too long then her family will track her down.

She's probably being illogical – after all, it's Teddy that she's running from, not her relatives – but she's always been solitary and somehow she _needs _this, needs to be away from the crowd and the noise and the constant competing to be centre-stage.

She waves goodbye to the people of the village, her skin chapped and red from the cold and her spirits singing with sorrow to be leaving them all. It's the most accepted she's ever felt – no worries that they're just being nice to her for her name or her family.

She returns to the town and she gets a train to China.

She doesn't stay in Shanghai for long – she feels too obvious, too out-of-place, with her palepale skin and blazing green eyes and flaming hair, so she tries an aeroplane for the first time and hates it all the way to Nice.

She only stays in Nice long enough to see a newspaper headline that, when she casts a subtle translation spell on it, screams 'Harry Potter's Daughter Still Missing, Twelve British Aurors On The Case!" She gets on the next plane and ends up in Canada.

She starts to hop around from place to place, staying in the North and only taking trains, living out of a small suitcase and caring less and less each day that the return to school is approaching. She decided somewhere in Ontario that she had no intention of going back, and she doesn't even feel a little bit guilty at the prospect of avoiding her NEWTs entirely – it's just another way to break the mould, and besides her dad did it, so shouldn't she be allowed to do the same?

She strays down into the USA for a bit, risking a day in New York, and then she tries a little while in Florida but her soul cries out for snow so she spends nearly two weeks on a train that takes her all the way to Alaska.

She's in a bar in Bethel when it turns midnight and something sparks inside her. She doesn't know what it is, but the world has shifted somehow and she just has to sit, completely blanking the man she'd been chatting to, and feel it for a moment.

The next morning she wakes up in a stranger's bed and remembers that it's her birthday.

"I'm seventeen," she whispers to herself, testing the words out, "I can do magic outside of school."

She revels in the lack of Trace, cleaning the man's whole house with magic before he's awake, and then conjuring herself an entirely new outfit up before she leaves, stealing away before her unknown bedfellow ever wakes up.

She spends the whole day moving around the town trying out her magic, changing the colours of things and revelling in the _power _she feels. She's no longer a helpless child with no protection. Nothing can stop her now.

;;

The real reason she's running starts to make itself obvious around mid-October. She's in the depths of the Katmai Park and Wilderness, sleeping on the floor of a little hut, having been fed by a kind old man and his kinder wife, and she wakes up with a gasp from a dream about a boy with golden eyes and turquoise hair tumbling her into pristine white sheets, his touch setting her on fire.

She staggers to the door and throws up what remains of her dinner the night before. She has to wait until the old couple are up and about and the man is preparing to make a run into the distant town on his surprisingly modern snow jet ski, which takes an agonisingly long time.

She gets back into town and she sits in a bar for four hours, her stomach churning, thinking that of all the clichés her life has turned into, this is the worst yet. Because when it was just her it was all okay, she could just be responsible for herself (or _irresponsible_) and nothing mattered. But now there's a whole other person to deal with, a tiny little person who belongs half to somebody who's more than willing to deny that he never even slept with her, and she can't just make this about her any more.

Then she gets so drunk that she can't remember her own name, and when she wakes up the next morning with her worst hangover yet, in bed next to yet another naked stranger, she gives up.

She gets dressed quickly and efficiently and she steals out of his house and she finds the first train she can.

As she travels, she watches the snow recede into woodland and she barely sleeps at all, finding herself instead fascinated by a girl who can't be more than half a year older than herself, trying to calm a fretting baby in the sleeper opposite her.

"He's lovely," Lily ventures one evening when she's grown tired of staring up at the ceiling of her little compartment and worrying, sitting cross-legged as she watches the other girl, "What's his name?"

"He's a she," the other girl replies with defensive look, and Lily spares a moment to wonder whether she'll know how to use that look, that anger mixed with pride and a love so fierce it nearly burns, if she keeps her baby, "Her name is Chloe."

Lily closes her eyes and breathes deeply, the memory of her best friend suddenly a fearsome stab, wondering how on Earth she's gone this long without feeling so guilty. Her eyes flash open and she meets the other girl's scowl with an easy smile that she's learnt over these past few months can put people quickly at ease.

"She's gorgeous. My name's Lily. Who're you?"

"I'm Vanessa," the stranger ventures, and her eyes rove to the gentle curve of Lily's stomach, swelling beneath her too-tight jumper, and she's suddenly understanding, "You're pregnant?"

Lily can't bring herself to say the words, so she just nods and she feels sick the minute the truth is out there, confirmed and undeniable. Vanessa tilts her head over at her, gently rocking a still-babbling Chloe, "You gonna keep it?"

"I don't know," Lily replies quietly, fingers knotting in the corner of the ragged bedspread, "It's complicated."

Vanessa shifts sideways and then smiles a smile identical to Lily's one of only a few minutes previously, and then pats the space on her own bed next to her.

"Tell me."

So Lily clambers across and she finds herself explaining about a boy who's engaged to her cousin and who's eleven years too old for her who got stupendously drunk at another cousin's birthday party and told her that he loved her and would pick her if she wasn't so young (-"You're only a _child_, Lily, goddamnit"-) and then was gone the second he woke up the morning after, not even stopping to pick up his discarded boxers.

With the curtains drawn, Vanessa listens and listens and when Lily's done she wordlessly holds a tissue out to her. Lily accepts it and wipes away her tears and thinks that this is probably the lowest she's sunk so far, and that that's really saying something.

"Your family are looking for you?" Vanessa asks after she's sat in silence, obviously digesting Lily's story, and when Lily nods she continues, "Then you should go back. You're lucky. My family didn't come to look for me."

"Why not?" Lily asks in astonishment, taking in pretty Vanessa and her pretty baby and thinking that her family must be mad, she's a far nicer girl than Lily will ever be able to claim to be, "My family would probably kill to switch me for you."

"They're very religious," the other girl explains with a sigh, rocking little Chloe absently, "I was a massive embarrassment. But it's okay, my boyfriend took me in, so we do okay. But you – you've got your family. You shouldn't drive them away."

"They don't know about me and Teddy, though," Lily points out, reaching out a hand to let Chloe grasp one of her fingers, feeling like crying as the baby clutches tightly, "Or about me being… y'know. They might kick me out too."

"They won't," Vanessa replies confidently, smiling reassuringly over at Lily.

"How do you know?"

"They're still looking for you, aren't they?"

Lily can't argue with that, so she falls quiet to think about that and when the train finally arrives in New York she's made her decision.

;;

The plane journey to London is as hellish as she remembers her last plane journey being, stuck in between some screaming toddler and a man who keeps trying to see down her shirt, so she puts her chair back and tries to fall asleep.

When the plane lands she staggers off with stiff legs and rumpled hair and goes straight to the bathroom to be sick. She manages to freshen herself up with a few quick spells, and then she marches out of the airport with her head held high, catches the tube, and emerges into the hustle and bustle of London with a determined stride.

She goes into the first shop she can find and splashes out what she has left of her English Muggle money on a good outfit – she's a firm disciple of the belief that a good outfit adds tonnes to your confidence – and then, just like that, she finds the visitor's entrance to the Ministry of Magic and walks straight out into the foyer as though she's the Minister for Magic himself.

She heads straight to the Floo office and bangs her hand down on the desk of the official working there.

"I need a floo connection to Hogwarts," she demands, ignoring the shock on the look of the wizard's face, "Now."

"But – but – but you're Lily Potter! The whole –"

"_Now_," she hisses icily, and he's in such shock that it's all too easy to use a quick Confundus charm on him and get her connection. She steps into the fireplace and shouts, "Slytherin common room!" and suddenly she's whirling and it's all she can do not to throw up yet again as she decides that, from now on, she's sticking to trains.

She collapses out onto the hearthrug in the Slytherin common room, displacing ash and soot and coughing like she'll hack up her lungs. She manages to stagger to her feet and finds herself confronted with a roomful of astonished Slytherins, staring at her like she's Salazar Slytherin himself come back to life.

"At ease, men," she tells them blithely, and then she walks right through the middle of them with her chin up, and finds the familiar steps up to the girl's dorms with sure feet.

She bursts into the seventh year girls' dorm and freezes in the doorway, suddenly impossibly choked up with emotion, as a blonde girl stares back at her with a face so white she might be a ghost.

"_Lily_?" Chloe whispers in pure disbelief, and without meaning to be Lily's crying as she rockets towards her best friend. The two girls crash together near the foot of Chloe's bed, both of them sobbing their hardest as their hands clutch at each other and take solace and comfort and reassurance.

"Oh, Merlin, Lily," Chloe keeps gasping, and Lily is entirely beyond words, just weeping into her best friend's hair.

When she does find words, they're "I'm sorry, I'm sorry".

;;

She sits on Chloe's bed and she tells her everything, every tiny detail she can remember about Teddy and about running and about hiding and about _everything_.

"Fucking hell, Lily," Chloe says after she's sat in silence to think about all of this, "You're an idiot."

Lily laughs, then, and hugs Chloe tightly and then she takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes and asks the question she's been dreading asking since she first decided to come back to Hogwarts.

"Will you come with me to get an abortion?"

She cracks one eye open, surprised into nervousness by her best friend's silence, and finds Chloe just _looking _at her.

"You sure?"

"Absolutely," Lily says firmly, and Chloe looks at her a little more before shrugging and grinning and leaping off the bed with all the fire that has made Lily so happy to be her friend all these years.

"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go!"

They head back through the common room arm-in-arm, and the door to the common room bursts open to admit Lily's father just as the emerald flames are whisking the pair back to the Ministry, too quickly for Lily to even hear him shout her name.

They stagger out into the Ministry foyer, and get out of there as quickly as they can, in no doubt that there'll be some sort of manhunt going on for them now that Lily's father knows she's back in the country.

They take a taxi to the nearest Muggle hospital, not wanting to draw attention to themselves by using magic, and they just stand and stare at the big building, hand-in-hand.

"I'm scared," Lily admits quietly, her eyes wandering over the pristine hospital front, taking in the big windows and too-green plants. It's this or risk the story being all over wizarding newspapers by tomorrow by going to a potion shop to find an abortion potion, which she's heard are messy and really not as practical as doing things the Muggle way anyway.

"You don't have to," Chloe reminds her gently, squeezing her fingers, "We could go back to Hogwarts."

"No, no, I do have to," Lily insists, biting the nails on her free hand, "It's go in now or be walking out in four months with a baby. I know which one I want."

So they step through the main doors and they walk quickly through to the reception, hustling their way into the next appointment with a couple of sneaky Confundus charms – Muggles are hopelessly easy to manipulate – and not twenty minutes later Lily is lying on a starched white bed with a woman hovering over her and the room full of strange metal things that she'll be seeing behind her eyes for the rest of her life.

"Are you sure about this?" the woman asks, and Lily pretends that she's not crying as she nods and Chloe squeezes her hand and the woman looms closer.

;;

She finds herself in the front garden of her home roughly an hour later, and as she just stands and stares up at the achingly familiar house she wonders for a moment how she got there – the last thing she remembers is Chloe apparating her out of that horrible white room after the procedure was finished. She assumes that Chloe must have left her and gone back to school.

She doesn't know whether she'll go in.

It's a bit of a dilemma, actually. She could not go in, and instead run again. But to be honest her family's probably got lookouts at every aeroplane and train station in the country, and besides her dad will be able to track her too easily now he's seen her. She's become good at concealment charms, but not good enough to fend off the head of the Auror department.

And then she could go in. See who's home, see how much trouble she's in, see whether the house will feel the same as it did all those months ago when she fled from Teddy and her suffocating feelings for him.

Her decision is made for her when the front door opens slowly and a boy (man) with purple hair and very yellow eyes appears from the shadows of the hallway to stand on the doorstep, his eyes trained on her, his body movements cautious as though she'll be spooked like a flighty horse.

She doesn't say anything for a while, just stands there and looks at him, studies the tense lines of his shoulders and the weariness in his face and the fact that a weight seems to have been suddenly lifted from him by the sight of her.

She opens her mouth to speak after a lifetime, and she means to say something cutting and snide like, "You've got fat" or "Oops, sorry, I was looking for someone who cared," but instead she merely says, "I hate you."

At least it's simple and to the point, she supposes, as he sighs and runs a hand through his now-black hair and takes a cautious step closer.

"I suppose I deserve that."

"I hate you," she repeats with slightly less conviction this time, moving backwards a pace or two, "You broke my heart."

"I know," he murmurs, and she's kind of satisfied in a really sick way to see how hurt he looks about this, "I'm sorry. If that makes it better."

"Not really," she replies with a shrug, holding her ground now, "You did sleep with me and then propose to my cousin. Usually it takes a bit more than a 'sorry' to fix something like that."

He drops to sit on the front doorstep, eyes now a vacant grey that don't meet her own green ones as he withdraws a lighter from a back pocket. He digs around to find a cigarette and then lights it with hands that, to his credit, only shake a little. He dares to glance up at her then, taking a drag, and for some reason it's that that finally sets her off.

"Don't you _dare_!" she screams, and she doesn't care that she's doing this in her front garden where the world can see and hear, doesn't care that she never meant to react to him at all, "Don't you _dare _sit there and smoke! You quit, remember? You quit because I hated it so much and I begged you stop and you did, finally, you did and you said it was because you _loved_ me."

"Lily –" he tries to interrupt, but then suddenly she's sitting down on the ground and staring at him with slightly wild eyes, fists clenched against the grass, legs spontaneously not working.

"Is loving me really something so easily thrown away?"

"Fucking hell, Lily!" he exclaims, and all of a sudden he's flicking the damned cigarette into the flowerbed and rushing to kneel down next to her, all lanky limbs and broad shoulders and black hair, "I love you. Of course I love you – it's _you_. How could I not? But… but you're _seventeen_ and you ran away and you're a _child _and – and – and do your parents even know you're here?"

"'Course not," she replies, wanting to shake off the hand that he's placed on her shoulder, but not quite being able to bring herself to do so, "You think we'd be able to be arguing like this if they did?"

He shuts his eyes and then all of a sudden his arms are going around her and he's holding her against him in that way he's always held her, and it's an embrace that makes her think of warm sunny days and teenage sadness and _don'tthinkitdon'tthinkit_ (love).

She tries to fight it because she's Lily Luna Potter, okay, and she has her _pride. _But there's thing he does with his hand on the nape of her neck, and it makes her go nearly cross-eyed with pleasure.

"That's cheating," she tells him firmly, because if he's taken control of the rest of her body she'll have control of her voice, thank you, "And you stink of smoke."

"You know," he says, and his hold on her tightens, as if he just needs to keep reminding himself that she's really here, "You're kind of impossible. By all rights you should be really quiet, you know? Because all the Gryffindors in your family are the loud ones, and everyone else is quiet. But you… you can't be quiet for more than a minute. You're louder than even Dominique."

"You'd better be going somewhere with this," Lily warns darkly, because after all she's not here for a dissection of her character, she's here to… well, to not get a character dissection, that's for sure.

"And you're impossible because you make me love you," he murmurs, and when she twists her head to look up at him he won't meet her eyes, his own trained on some distant point, a distractingly bright pink, "Which I shouldn't. I mean, come on, you're a _child_. I've known you as long as you've lived. And it was always supposed to be Vic, with me, you know? It's what everyone thought. And then you came along… rules and destiny and things like that don't matter when you're in the room, did you know that? You make everything else stop mattering. Everything. You have that _smile _and you just want everything so _badly_. It's heartbreaking and awe-inspiring all at the same time."

She's speechless now, but for once she doesn't even bother fishing for the words. She just leans her head back to rest on his shoulder and breathes in his scent, ignoring the undertone of stale smoke.

"I nearly had a baby," she tells him, more to make him look at her than anything else, "But then I decided not to."

She gets her wish – his hands are suddenly on her shoulders and he's twisting her to look at him, almost shaking her in his shock, "You _what_?"

"Yeah," she replies coolly, in that Slytherin way she knows has always infuriated him, "You knocked me up, did you know that? It was pretty nasty, actually," she continues, more to fill the gaping silence that his disbelief has left, "I was sick and everything. But the Muggles were really good at abortions – d'you reckon that's a symptom of society or something? That's what Rose would say – and so now I'm not any more. Pregnant, that is. If you wanted to know."

"You – Lily, _why didn't you tell me_?" he demands, and his hair is a wild red and his eyes are wide and – is he _scared_? "You should have told me!"

"And you'd have done what?" she taunts, batting his hands away impatiently, scrambling backwards, "You wouldn't even admit that you slept with me. It was _everything _to me and then you acted like it never even happened. You proposed to Vic the next _week_, Teddy."

"I didn't know, Lils," he replies, one hand reaching out towards her, and she notices suddenly that he's wearing a jumper that she knitted him when she was nine and went through a phase of wanting to be like her grandmother, and she doesn't know why but it's this that sparks the tears at the back of her eyes.

"Fuck off, Teddy," she tells him firmly, and she hurries to her feet and races to the house, "Just fuck off and leave me alone. I don't ever want to see you again."

;;

Half an hour later it occurs to Harry and Ginny to check their house, nobody having seen hide nor hair of Lily since she disappeared from the Ministry, and they apparate home to find Teddy sitting on the front doorstep looking utterly disconsolate, dragging moodily at a cigarette, hair a dull brown colour.

"She's inside," he says without preamble, not looking up at them, "She locked me out."

Ginny lets out a frustrated sigh and strides up to pluck the cigarette out of his mouth, vanishing it and giving him an enormous scowl.

"I find you smoking on my doorstep one more time, Theodore Lupin," she threatens darkly, "And you are banned from family dinners forever."

Harry ignores them, striding past the pair to try the door. As Teddy stated, it is locked, and doesn't yield to any of the spells he tries – nor any of Ginny's when she joins them.

"She's got your skill," Ginny informs him, tilting her head back to look up at the windows to see if she can catch a glimpse of her daughter, and Harry is about to ask why she's not more worried and desperate about the fact that Lily is in there, Lily is _just inside _and she's been missing for _four months _– and then Ginny goes mad.

She throws herself at the door, beating at it with ineffectual fists, screaming, "Lily Luna Potter, you open up this door _right this second _or I am going to _blast this house apart _piece by piece until you're the only thing left standing and I can –"

"Hi, Mum," a voice says with just the faintest undertone of amusement, and Ginny freezes as the door creaks open and Lily's slim form appears, face pale and devoid of make-up and eyes red-rimmed and puffy from crying. She wraps her oversized cardigan more tightly around herself and stands in the semi-darkness of the hallway and just looks at her parents, waiting for a reaction.

It doesn't take long.

Ginny flings herself at her daughter at the same moment Harry does, and they crush her in a three-way hug as Ginny starts to rant about how scared they were and how she's never ever to do something like that again, and oh yeah she's grounded until she's sixty and she's banned from ever going out.

Lily stops listening pretty quickly, and with one arm around her mother's neck and one around her father's she just stands there, and it's funny because her mother might be the one talking a mile a minute but it's her father's reaction she's worried about. He's just standing there with his arms tightly around her and his face in her hair and his mouth shut, breathing slowly and steadily and somehow she feels far more picked apart by his silent reproach than by her mother's rant.

"I'm sorry," she ventures eventually, cutting her mother off mid-spiel, "Really. I am."

Ginny shuts up this time and her parents just stand and look at her – because Lily doesn't _do _apologising, not to anyone, no matter what she's done.

"Missed you, froglet," Harry tells her finally, and she beams and she doesn't mean to be but she's crying again as she leaps at him and wraps her arms almost chokingly around his neck and feels the smallest she's ever felt.

"Missed you too, Dad."

;;

She stays at home for three weeks, refusing to go out or to see anyone. This worries Ginny more than anything, because the old Lily would have been chafing at her restrictions and trying to sneak out every five minutes (and probably succeeding) and getting moody and lashing out.

Instead she spends hours sitting at the window on the landing and watching the street in total silence.

Harry goes off to work every morning and drops a kiss onto her forehead, telling her to have a good day, kissing Ginny goodbye at the front door and not saying anything because he knows how worried she is, and she knows how worried he is, and it's funny because Lily's home but it's like she never came back at all.

She won't talk about where she went or why she ran away – but Ginny is beginning to put two-and-two together from the amount of times that Teddy's turned up at the front door and been met with a stony silence as Lily refuses to acknowledge his presence.

"Hey, honey," she says gently as she seats herself opposite her daughter by the window one sunny morning, reaching out to put a hand on Lily's knee, "Do you want anything for lunch?"

"No thanks," Lily replies without looking away from the street, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail and face bare of make-up, still in her pyjamas, looking impossibly thirteen and setting Ginny wondering all over again.

"You need to eat," she insists, patting Lily's knee, "I'll make you brownies, if you like?"

Lily turns to look at her suddenly, the sunlight catching the green of her eyes like the blaze of the Northern Lights, "Why aren't you angry with me, Mum?"

"What do you mean? Have you done something I should be angry about?"

"No, it's just," Lily begins, and her fingers are twisting in the hem of her t-shirt and she looks like there's something she's dying to say but can't quite bring herself to, "I thought you'd try to murder me for disappearing. I don't understand why you're being so _nice_."

"Believe or not," Ginny says, reaching out and tucking a stray strand of hair behind her daughter's ear, "I did want to murder you for a bit. But, the thing is, I've realised how close I came to losing you… I'm just glad that you're back, that's all. Although I would appreciate an explanation. Why you did it and everything. Your father would, too. He's worried about you, you know. Really worried."

"Dad's always worried," Lily replies with an eye roll and just the barest hint of her usual sarcasm, "He wouldn't be Dad if he wasn't."

"Don't deflect," Ginny orders firmly, and Lily sighs and won't meet her mother's eyes and shrugs.

"I had to get away. I didn't mean to stay away for so long, but I loved it out there. The further away I got the less everything started to matter. It was great."

"Why did you have to get away?" Ginny presses, not about to let this opportunity go to waste, "I deserve an explanation, Lily. You didn't even send us a letter to tell you that you were okay. We thought you might be _dead_, for Merlin's sake!"

"Please, Mum," Lily says, drawing her knees up against her face, "Please don't. It's not – it's just that… I can't tell you."

"_Why _can't you tell me?" Ginny demands, throwing her hands up in the air, "For crying out loud, Lily! You vanished for _four months_! The whole family was in uproar! James spent six weeks scouring every inch of this country for you, did you know that? Albus went to Charlie in Romania and then worked his way across the whole of Europe! Dominique threatened to drop out of school to find you, Teddy broke up with Victoire because –"

"_Don't talk to me about Teddy_!" Lily shrieks, and suddenly she's on her feet with her hands balled into fists at her sides and her whole face an ugly red, "It's always Teddy, _always_! You all love him so much and he's just… he's so… I _hate _him. I hate him I hate him I hate him!"

She finishes with an almost triumphant air, staring her mother down as though daring her to contradict her. But Ginny is just sitting there with her arms folded and one eyebrow raised in genuine astonishment.

"It was Teddy, wasn't it?" she asks softly, staring up at her daughter, "That's why you ran away. Because of Teddy and Victoire."

"No," Lily corrects stiffly, "It's so much more than him and Victoire. That's only part of it. You just… never mind. It doesn't even matter. They're getting married and everyone's thrilled and it's all going to be just –"

"Lily, love, he's eleven years older than you," Ginny reminds her gently, reaching up to take her hand, "He can't help not loving you – I know that you were always his favourite out of all you kids, but he's grown up now, and you're almost there yourself. He's not going to start loving you just because you've got a crush on him."

"Oh, God," Lily says, yanking her hand out her mother's grasp, "You really don't have a clue, do you?"

"Don't you talk to me like that, young lady," Ginny admonishes in outrage, but then Lily's shouting again and Ginny almost can't believe the words coming out of her mouth.

"He said he loved me!" Lily announces fiercely, hair swishing as she gesticulates wildly, "He said he loved me and he promised he'd pick me and then – and then…"

Out of nowhere she's crying and Ginny's head is spinning at the rapidity with which Lily's emotions switch, but she gets to her feet anyway and encloses her daughter in an embrace, stroking her hair and whispering soothingly against her skull.

"And then what, darling?"

Lily mumbles something unintelligible and shakes her head, clutching onto her mother like she's afraid she's going to drift away, tears soaking the shoulder of Ginny's top.

"It doesn't matter," she manages to convey between sobs; "I hate him. That's what matters. I hate him more than anything."

"More than splinters?" Ginny inquires, trying to lighten the mood, naming the one thing that Lily's always hated most in the world.

"More than splinters," Lily confirms without the barest hint of humour, and that's when Ginny realises that maybe she doesn't have a clue what's going on here after all.

;;

James and Albus arrive home from their respective homes one snowy weekend just before Christmas, meeting each other quite by chance at the garden gate.

"You seen Lily yet?" James inquires as they march side-by-side up the garden path, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

"Nope," Albus replies as he wraps his Gryffindor-red scarf tighter around his neck, "You?"

"Not yet," James says tightly, and the two brothers pause on the doorstep and glance at each other for a second, not really needing to say anything to know how the other is feeling. James may tease Al rotten and talk down to him but he knows without a second thought how his younger brother is feeling – the same as himself, he imagines. Worried and relieved that Lily's home, but mostly angry that she could do something like this to them.

"I feel bad being so angry when Mum and Dad keep telling us to be nice," Al confesses, neither of them quite ready to reach for the doorbell yet, "Do they keep owling you to tell you to go easy? Apparently she's in shock or something. I dunno why, I think we should be the ones in shock."

James sighs and lets his head fall back and he's about to reply when he notices a flash of red at the upstairs window. With a start, he realises that Lily is up there, watching them, her pale face thoughtful and very young. They gaze at each other for a long while, wordlessly, until Albus notices James's distraction and also glances up.

The three siblings stare at each other for a long moment, not able to put into the words the feelings running between them, and then Lily disappears suddenly. Al and James exchange another look, and then they hear a pitter-pattering of feet behind the door and Lily is pulling it open, feet bare and freezing under her pyjama bottoms.

"Hey," she says, somewhat nervously, fingers tugging at a loose thread on the bottom of her jumper, "I missed you guys."

"Mum and Dad warned us to be nice," James says stiffly, "But it's probably best if you just avoid me for now."

With that, he brushes past her and strides into the kitchen, tugging off his coat and yelling for his parents, announcing that he's hungry. Al hesitates when Lily turns back to him, and to his horror he notices that she's near to tears.

"I knew he'd hate me," she gulps, standing back to let Albus in the house, "I didn't mean to make him hate me."

"He doesn't hate you, Lils," Al promises as he unwinds his scarf, slipping back into the role of peacemaker between his considerably louder siblings as easily as breathing, "You scared him, that's all. And you know James and his stupid pride."

She drags a hand roughly over her eyes, as irritated as James gets by tears, and Al has to repress a smile. Although she's Slytherin and James is Gryffindor, they've always been far more similar than either of them will admit.

"I missed you, Al," she tells him as though it pains her slightly to admit it, "Even if you are shagging my best friend and always tell me off for stupid things and wear stupid jumpers."

"Missed you too, Lils," he replies with a smile, and then she's hugging him suddenly, so hard his breath is almost knocked out of him, her skinny arms woven tightly around his neck and her face in his shoulder. He folds his arms around her in return and cannot believe what a relief it is to know that she's back and the worry and sleeplessness is all over.

;;

It takes Lily four days but eventually she wears James down enough that he'll talk to her in more than grunts, and Al comes down to the kitchen one night at about three o' clock in the morning to find his siblings already there, the lights on. Lily is leaning against the side of the oven and laughing as James flicks obsessively through a recipe book making stupid faces.

"What are you guys doing?" he inquires in a hiss, running a hand through already-rumpled hair and shutting the door carefully behind him, "It's the middle of the night!"

"Don't fret, Al," James says patronisingly, and so loudly that Al winces, "We've got a silencing charm on the room."

"We're making brownies," Lily chips in, waving her oven-glove-covered hands to prove her point, inclining her head to indicate the red timer beeping on the oven door, "We were watching the telly and we got hungry."

"At three in the morning?" Al asks incredulously, flopping down into a chair at the head of the table.

"We haven't been to bed yet," James informs him, waving a wooden spoon importantly, "We got distracted watching Mum's Sex and the City DVDs back-to-back."

"James didn't believe me when I told him that women talk about sex," Lily explains with a grin, and Al can only sit there, astounded by their sudden descent back into their old intimacy.

"Al, do you –" James begins, but then the oven pings and Lily leaps into action with a cry of delight, hopping off the counter she'd been sitting on and yanking the oven door open, grimacing as the heat hits her but sticking it out and grabbing the brownies, pulling them out and dumping them on the side in one swift movement with a clatter that makes Al hope that James is as good at silencing charms as he thinks he is.

One quick cooling charm later and the three siblings are falling on the brownies, sitting around the kitchen table and bickering just like they used to, and when their parents come down the next morning they find Lily fast asleep against James' shoulder and Al face-down on the kitchen table, all three of them covered in chocolate and an empty plate in between them.

"Do we even want to know?" Harry inquires, and James just opens one eye a crack and gives a bleary shake of the head before going right back to sleep.

;;

That afternoon Lily and Al have retreated back to bed, but James has always had a lot of energy so when Harry and Ginny disappear out to do some last-minute shopping for Christmas, he is the only one left awake in the Potter household.

He sits down to write a letter to his fiancée Jenny, who is on holiday with her family in the Caribbean, and he's just about to go and steal Al's owl out of his room when there's a tentative knock at the front door. James bounds up to open it and discovers Teddy standing slightly uncomfortably on the doorway.

"Hey, mate," James says in delight, beckoning Teddy in, "Long time no see!"

"I've been avoiding Lily," Teddy confesses as he enters the hallway, tossing his jacket with an ease that belies long practice onto a hook and heading straight to the kitchen, "But I haven't seen you since you got back, so I wanted to drop by. Is she in?"

"Yeah, but she's asleep," James reassures him, following him back into the kitchen and switching the kettle on, "Why are you avoiding her?"

"I wrote her a letter," Teddy informs him, tugging a writing-covered piece of parchment out of a pocket as he collapses into a chair, "And this is what she sent back."

He holds the parchment up to James to show off the words, "_FUCK OFF AND DIE_" written in bright red ink in Lily's unmistakeable scrawl, right across the neatly-written letter.

"Bloody hell," James says in astonishment, eyebrows nearly shooting up to his hairline, "What did you _do_?"

"You don't want to know," Teddy replies, tucking the letter away again and then running a hand through his messy hair, the colour of it gradually waning to purple without his noticing.

James shrugs and jabs his wand at the kettle to speed it up, then pours a mug of tea for both himself and Teddy before sitting down and striking up a conversation about the relative merits of the new Firebolt 3.0 as opposed to the Thundercloud 1.2.

About an hour or so later the pair are in a ferocious argument over whether the Chudley Cannons will ever win a match when suddenly the kitchen door flies open and Lily staggers in, hair everywhere and wearing a sweater that James is sure he recognises.

"Isn't that the jumper Jenny gave me last Christmas?" he demands, interrupting Teddy's rant mid-flow and glaring at his sister.

"It's soft," is Lily's only reply, and then she seems to become aware of who is sitting at the table with James. She folds her arms and leans against the doorway, her face instantly unreadable and emotionless.

"Teddy's here," James announces somewhat redundantly, feeling the awkwardness suddenly pervade the room.

"You didn't get my note, then," Lily says lightly, and as Teddy turns around slowly he notes the tight line of her jaw and thinks it sad that she's always been the one person he could read so easily.

"No, no, he got it," James butts in cheerfully, "He showed it to me."

"Did he show you what he wrote in the letter?" Lily inquires in a low, spiteful tone, and Teddy is shaking his head and uttering a pleading, "No, Lily," when her tone turns needling and bitter, and she grins ferally as she adds, "About how he fucked me and knocked me up at Roxanne's birthday party the week before he proposed to Vic?"

James drops his mug of tea.

"I'll take that as a no, then," Lily says with a scornful smirk, and with that she disappears out of the room, legs very long and bare under the sweatshirt.

"Please, James," Teddy says desperately, already backing away, "You can beat the hell out of me later – but, please, let me talk to her. I need to talk to her."

James puts his fingers on the bridge of his nose and takes several very deep breaths.

"You have ten minutes, and then I'm beating the shit out of you."

"That should be enough," Teddy vows hopefully, and then he's vanishing out of the kitchen in pursuit of Lily, leaving James covered in tea and so angry he doesn't quite know what to do with himself.

;;

"You shouldn't have told James," Teddy announces from the doorway to Lily's room, gazing down at her form on the bed, face-down in her pillows, "It'll kill him."

"It's killing _me_," she mutters, and her voice is muffled but he can hear every syllable anyway.

"I really am sorry, you know," he tells her gently, taking another step into the room and shutting the door carefully behind himself.

"Sorry for what, exactly?" Lily demands, turning her face up to glare at him, fists clenched in her sheets, "Sorry for sleeping with me? Sorry for running away in the morning? Sorry for saying that you loved me, sorry for marrying Vic, sorry for –"

"I didn't marry Vic," Teddy interrupts hastily, moving closer daringly, "She dumped me. I kind of told her… about us. And she could see how worried I was about you being gone. The longer you were away the more it got to me."

"Nice of you to fucking come and look for me then, huh?" Lily retorts angrily, turning her face away from him again, her tone considerably softer as she adds, "I wanted you to look for me, you know. I wanted you to _find_ me. Every day."

"I looked, Lily, alright?" Teddy replies shortly, "I looked fucking _everywhere_. I didn't come home for six weeks because I was looking for you. But you were nowhere. It was like you'd vanished."

"That was the _point_," she sighs, and she still won't look at him so he crosses the room and walks around her bed and crouches down so their faces are nearly on the same level, her green eyes wide and untrusting as she meets his gaze steadily and accusingly.

"You know," Teddy says, reaching out and nervously plaiting and unplaiting one of the tassels on her fluffy white blanket, "I thought… when you got back, on the lawn… I kind of thought – hoped, really – that maybe… maybe you still loved me? Even just a little bit?"

"Maybe," Lily repeats blankly, "And maybe not. It doesn't matter anyhow. I'm still – what was it? Oh yeah, a _child_. Even though I took care of myself for four months and kept ahead of the _whole fucking British auror department_. I'm definitely still a child. Teddy the wise. You should have been a fucking Ravenclaw."

"Stop it," he commands, raising a hand and clamping it across her lips, "Your mouth is too pretty to keep saying ugly words like that."

He sees the flash in her eyes that is her wanting to bite his palm, but then she appears to calm it and she very coolly reaches up and wrenches his fingers away.

"You never cared that I swore before," she replies defiantly, still looking at him sideways, expression tight and challenging, "You think that sleeping with me suddenly gives you the right?"

"For fuck's sake, Lily!" he exclaims in exasperation, because Merlin she's just so _non-stop _and does she have an answer to _everything _or what?

"What's the matter?" she taunts, and suddenly she's sitting up to look condescendingly down at him, a smirk that is pure Slytherin written across her face, "Can't take it? Figures, I suppose. Teddy Lupin, the Gryffindor with the courage of a fucking _bumblebee_. Why don't you just fuck off and –"

He cuts her off, then, the most effectively he's ever cut her off in her whole life, closing the gap between them suddenly and desperately, reaching out and pulling her towards him with something that's half-gasp, half-prayer, his hands fumbling for her and his mouth ascending to hers roughly and hungrily until all he can feel, hear, sense is Lily and her tangled hair around his fingers and her slim waist within the protective curve of his arm and her arms around his neck as she kisses him back just as desperately, her lips moulding to his.

Their breathing speeds up and grows ragged, until their heaving chests are almost touching and Lily has to break away to drag in a hearty lungful of oxygen, her eyes wide and somewhat glazed when they meet his.

"Cheater," she says a little unsteadily, the fingers of one hand flying up to trace her lips, as if to check that this has really happened, "Aren't Gryffindors supposed to be honourable?"

"Not in love," Teddy replies, and before she can roll her eyes or wince at the cheesiness he kisses her again, more sweetly this time, feeling every inch of her against him and wishing, praying, that loving her didn't have to be so hard.

;;

James, as promised, comes up shortly afterwards, drags Teddy out to the back garden, and beats the shit out of him.

Lily lets him because, well, Slytherins have always had revenge issues and besides she can fix him up quickly afterwards, and it does James a world of good.

From her bedroom window, Lily waves goodbye to a blood-covered Teddy, who smiles in a slightly unfocused manner and then disapparates. Lily spares a brief moment to think that maybe he shouldn't be doing that in his condition, but then she decides that he's a big boy and can make his own decisions.

She starts as James appears in her bedroom doorway, his expression menacing and arms folded, Quidditch muscles bulging admittedly impressively beneath his t-shirt.

"Explain," he commands shortly, his brown eyes dark and discomforted, "Explain what the fuck is going on here."

Lily sits and just looks at him for a while, because he might be twenty-one years old and far too cocky for anyone's good, but he's her big brother who always protects her and teases her and who she's irritated and undermined for as long as she's been alive – and she can see under his seething façade that he's hurt and confused and more than a little scared.

"He fucked up," Lily says quietly, "But I did too. We both did. But… I think it's okay now. I think it's all okay."

"He got you _pregnant_, Lily," James reminds her, entering the room and unfolding his arms, taking a seat on the edge of her bed and gazing at her as though willing her to deny it, "He's like part of our family and he got you _pregnant_."

Lily sighs and takes in the disappointed slump of his shoulders – because this is Teddy and this is James and it's not exactly a secret that Teddy is everything James has ever wanted to be – and she knows in that heartbeat that just one more lie won't hurt anybody.

"No, he didn't," she says firmly, getting up and sinking down onto the bed next to her brother, "That was a lie. I'm sorry. I wanted to make you hate him. That was wrong."

"Oh, thank _Merlin_," James exclaims, and then his arms are wrapping around her and his breath is in her hair and she can feel his grin against her scalp, "You scare me like that again, Lily Luna, and I'll tell Mum you had sex with him."

"Then I'll tell her it was you that sold her Witch Weekly's Quidditch Player of the Year award to Mundungus Fletcher," she says into his shoulder.

"You _wouldn't_," James hisses in outrage, taking her by the upper arms and yanking her backwards so that he can glare at her, "Even _you're _not that evil."

"You honestly believe that?" Lily inquires with an eyebrow raised, and James rolls his eyes and then pulls her back into a hug. Lily puts her arms around him this time, and when Al finally wakes up and pauses at the door to Lily's room to find his siblings sitting on Lily's bed laughing their heads off, he enters the room with a yawn and throws himself down next to them.

"What did I miss?" he asks sleepily, and James and Lily exchange a glance and then turn identical innocent grins on him.

"Nothing!" they chorus, and Al believes that about as much as he believes that Uncle Ron once beat Aunt Hermione in a Charms test, but with the weak winter sunshine streaming in through the window the day is too pretty to waste with disbelief so he just shakes his head and grins and joins in their conversation quickly and easily.

;;

Lily dreams of Teddy that night, and he of her, and the next morning he pitches up at the Potter household to find a very silent kitchenful of Potters waiting for him.

"James told them about us," Lily informs him cheerily from where she's sitting by a thunderous-looking Harry, "Because I told Mum about the Witch Weekly award."

"She had it coming," James chips in blithely, and Teddy doesn't really know what to think as Al snorts into his tea and Harry's expression grows even angrier.

"If Lily didn't assure us that you make her happy," Ginny begins, and Teddy's waiting expectantly for the rest of her speech when Harry interrupts, more explosively angry than Teddy's ever seen him.

"What in Merlin's name are you thinking, Teddy?" he demands, "She's _seventeen_! That's eleven years younger than you!"

"Dad, I'm right here," Lily reminds him calmly, levitating a spoon from the side next to James so she can take a mouthful of her cereal, "And I'd super appreciate it if you could refrain from the whole –"

"Lily, not now," Ginny warns as Al and James recognise the signs of a brewing storm with their unerring Weasley antenna for trouble, and creep skilfully from the room.

"I love you like a son, Teddy, you know that," Harry continues, knuckles white around the handle of his wand, "But this is my _daughter _we're talking about. She ran away from home because of you! She doesn't know enough and –"

"Still here, Dad," Lily announces in a chipper manner, prompting a hissed, "_Go to your room_!" from Ginny. Lily sighs, grabs her bowl of cereal and spoon, and flounces from the room, pausing at the doorway to look back at her parents.

"I really do love him," she informs them firmly, "So don't go all _vanquishers-of-Voldemort _on him, please?"

And with that, she disappears from the room, leaving Teddy alone to face the wrath of her thoroughly deflated parents.

"There were thirteen years between my parents," he reminds them somewhat tentatively, "And nobody denied that they were in love."

"But… but that was different," Harry replies, appearing to gain mastery of himself again.

"How?" Teddy demands, folding his arms and feeling his own temper starting to rise just a little bit, "Tell me how."

"Because Tonks wasn't my _daughter_!" Harry explodes, face red. Teddy is tense, ready to go for his wand for self-defence if he should need it. But then Ginny is suddenly laying a hand on her husband's arm and whispering something in his ear, and Teddy feels his hope spike as Ginny turns towards him with an incredibly serious expression on her face.

"You swear you love her?" she inquires in a tone without a hint of joking. Teddy meets her gaze and, without falter or doubt, replies, "Yes."

Harry rolls his eyes and gets up from the table, muttering something about being outvoted as he heads out of the room and upstairs.

"Let him talk to her," Ginny tells Teddy, getting up from the table with a weary expression, "Everything will be fine."

"You're okay with it?" Teddy inquires disbelievingly, and Ginny gives a shrug and heads over to the counter to start preparing lunch.

"Not exactly," she replies, and Teddy supposes that he has to appreciate her honesty at least, "But I trust you and I trust her and if you think you're right together then I'm not going to argue. Besides, you know you're already like our son anyway, this will just make it official."

"Thank you, Ginny," Teddy says sincerely, and she throws a grin that has all of its old radiance over her shoulder at him before starting to levitate ingredients out of various cupboards.

;;

About forty minutes later Teddy is helping Ginny cook when Harry appears back downstairs and, without preamble, informs Teddy that Lily wants him upstairs.

Teddy takes the stairs two at a time and discovers Lily sitting at the windowseat on the landing, gazing out onto the street below.

"It's going to be okay," she whispers, her forehead against the window, "It's really going to be okay."

"To be honest, I don't think okay even begins to cover it," Teddy tells her with a small grin, taking a seat beside her and taking her hand in his, his thumb tracing circles against her pale skin, "Not even close."

"Not even close," Lily repeats, and then she smiles at him so comfortably that he can't believe they haven't been like this forever.

Then they sit together and watch the world go by for hours.

* * *

**a/n**: if you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	11. molly

**a/n**: This is the oneshot that helped me out of my pit of non-writing despair back when I had still only completed Victoire's piece, so I really do love this one, regardless of how good it's turned out.

Molly, with the song _Halo _by Beyonce, which again isn't referred to specifically but which I have used for inspiration at some points.

* * *

"'_I think maybe everybody falls,' I say. 'I think maybe we all do. And I don't think that's the asking.' I pull on her arms gently to make sure that she's listening. 'I think the asking is whether we get back up.'" _– (Todd Hewitt to Viola Eade, from The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness)

* * *

there must be  
**MollyLorcan**

i just saw Haley's Comet, she waved,  
said "why you always running in place?"_  
- Second Chance, Shinedown_

_

* * *

_

What do you say when the boy you think you've always known suddenly turns out to be a man?

Well that's the question, isn't it? The thing that's going to keep her up at night worrying and wondering and considering. Because he's always been there, always been ready to be her shoulder to cry on, her rock and her confidante. No matter that he's three years older than her, because ages are just numbers and in the end we all die anyway, so who really cares?

And now he's in love with her sister (and her sister is in love with him) and it's like the whole world has just crashed down around her ears, _bangsmackcrash_, and all she can do is sit and watch as he wraps his arms around Lucy's waist and whispers something into her ear. All she can do is _stare_.

"It kind of hurts, doesn't it?" a voice murmurs into her ear, rough fingers brushing her hair aside as if it's tickling the nose of the owner of the voice, and she whirls to find her best friend's twin brother standing beside her, towering over her, his eyes fixed on his brother and her sister, something like the end of the world in his expression.

"More than I thought it would," Molly replies with a shrug, noticing simultaneously that his fingers are still resting against her skull as though he's forgotten that he moved them there, and that his eyes are far bluer than his twin's. And that's weird, because she'd always thought them identical.

"I'm sorry," he ventures eventually, finally turning back to look down at her, moving his hand and shoving it self-consciously into a pocket of his jeans, his hair falling in an unruly blonde mess into his eyes.

"Why?" she replies, looking up at him steadily, one pale finger moving upwards absently to wind into a short red curl, a habit that she's been trying to kick since forever, "Why are you sorry? You haven't done anything."

"I just," he begins, and now he's grinning a little uncomfortably and pushing his hair out of his eyes and squinting slightly as he looks down at her, "I just guess I know how it feels. And if I knew somebody else was feeling like me, I'd want to know that so I didn't feel quite so by myself."

"Oh," she says, rather lamely, and suddenly she's feeling her youth, feeling every inch of it, as she feels a flood of tenderness rise all the way up through her sixteen-year-old body to gather into her heart, the whole of her aching with pity for herself and this nineteen-year-old boy, not anywhere near the man his twin's just become. "Then I'm sorry too."

"You're looking at me funny," he announces, and there's something different in his voice now, something a little bit less like desperation. "Do I have something in my teeth?"

"No, no," Molly reassures him hastily, tilting her head and feeling her short curls shift about her neck, the pair on the other side of the room suddenly blurring out of focus, "You just… I don't know. You seem different."

"Cheers," he says, and now he's fully smiling, his mouth stretched out big and broad and he looks so sunny she can't help but crack a smile of her own, all pearly teeth and innocence and forgetting.

"Fancy a walk?" she inquires once they're done with just standing there smiling at each other, and he shrugs and (with a look back over his shoulder, shut up) they move together out through the front door, into the back garden and then with a brief, undignified scramble over the stone wall, they head out out into the woods beyond the house.

"So how's Hogwarts?" he inquires as they wander along together, breaking the silence that had been stretching somewhat uncomfortably between them, the guitar slung over his back bumping gently against him as he strides out with his long legs.

"Dull," she replies honestly, pushing her hair back behind her ears and tugging the sleeves of her cardigan further down over her hands, "I can't wait to finish, get out into the real world, you know?"

He looks at her askance then, eyebrows raised in surprise.

"What?" she demands, giving him a challenging look, shoving her hands into the pockets of her shorts, the sunlight falling through the overhead leaves in dappled patterns of green.

"_Nobody_ wants to leave Hogwarts," he informs her finally, blinking against a sudden bright patch of pure sunshine, "Not even people who are always in trouble."

"Yeah?" she replies sceptically, her pace quickening slightly as if she can deny him merely by outpacing him, "Well I do. Sorry if that goes against your belief systems and all."

"But…why?" he inquires, and she pauses then, because there is honest confusion and curiosity in his voice and when she looks at him he's got one hand outstretched as if to halt her, his face utterly intrigued. "Why do you want to leave?"

She sighs and keeps walking, talking more to the trees than to him, as if he's only an incidental listener.

"Because it's boring, and because all I am there is absolutely second-hand."

"What do you mean, second-hand?" he asks, striding more quickly to catch up with her until they suddenly break out of the woods and next to a stream, sunlight flooding right the way through them until they feel they might start glowing.

"I _mean_," she replies tightly, flopping down into the long grass and stretching out, her vest and cardigan riding up to show off a strip of pale midriff, her curls a messy halo around her frowning face, "I don't have anything original. My name is my grandmother's, Lucy was prefect and Head Girl, my Mum has the same sense of humour as me, I have the same colour hair as just about every other member of my family, and to cap it all I even have a second-hand best friend, who's ditched me the second he finally hooked up with my big sister."

He's silent as he considers this, sitting down in the grass and pulling his guitar around to rest in his lap, his fingers plucking absently at the strings and creating a pleasant melody to float over the sounds of the gurgling stream. Molly shuts her eyes, the sunlight burning her eyelids pink, and lets the peace of the afternoon run through her until the anger and disappointment is seeping from her limbs and leaving her pleasantly exhausted.

"I don't think you're second-hand," Lorcan ventures at last, and Molly cracks one hazel eye open to gaze up at him, one hand going up to block out the sun.

"What?"

"I think you're pretty cool, actually," he says nonchalantly, strumming a quick run of chords, as though it isn't any big deal that he's telling her this even though they've had, oh, twelve conversations before today in all the sixteen years they've known each other. "Don't worry about becoming original. You already mostly are."

"Mostly?" she replies when she finds she can still speak, that his declaration hasn't knocked her for six and left her feeling like a small child being complimented by their hero. A small smile spreads across her face, and she's repeating, "Only mostly?"

"Well, you still kind of sound like Rose when you're pissed," he tells her, and Molly would like to flare up at this but in all honesty he's given her probably the nicest compliment she's ever had, and it's so nice to finally be noticed after being overlooked for so long, the youngest-but-for-last-minute-Louis member of the family, after being pushed constantly into the shadows by her big sister, that she just blinks at him and lets her smile grow.

"Thank you," she says, and feels terribly fond as heat floods through his cheeks, as though he's suddenly embarrassed by his own words, "I think you're pretty hot stuff yourself."

He smiles slightly, down at the floor, and then he glances up and meets her eyes and there's something in his face that sets her pulse racing and her cheeks warming, so she shuts her eyes and feels the day and just listens as his fingers stretch for chords, the music soothing and pretty and really saying everything she would say if she had the words.

It says things like, _maybe tomorrow_, and _something had to go right like this eventually_, and _it was always him that looked like you and never the other way around_. And maybe this last is the biggest realisation of all, because it makes her eyes snap open and search for his, blueblueblue, and when their gazes meet, this time neither of them looks away.

* * *

**a/**n: if you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!


	12. louis

**a/n**: I'm pretty sure I promised to dedicate this oneshot to Aiiimy. So here it is, Aimes! Hope you like it!

I'm going to miss doing these. Miss the frantic typing days away from deadlines, miss the opportunities to work a lot of oneshots into one timeline, miss all the characters… so, yeah, I'll just be over here, holding myself a pity-party.

I also feel I should explain the 'double pairing' – technically, it's just LouisKatie, but Laura is the Dead Ringer For Love girl and so she really needs to be put in there too. Plus she's in it more than Katie.

And, yes, this _is _Lo from Victoire's oneshot. The way I see the Weasleys, Fleur and Bill have Louis when Dominique is about sixteen/seventeen and Victoire twenty-three, because they miss having a baby around and Fleur wants a boy. So Louis ends up more among the Next Next Generation than the Next Generation itself. If that makes sense.

With the song: Dead Ringer For Love by Meatloaf.

* * *

deus ex machina  
**LouisLaura** / **LouisKatie**

please please please let me get what I want,  
please please please.  
(_- Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, The Smiths_)

* * *

There's this bar that he frequents. It's nothing special – dark and a little dingy and filled with smoke, Muggle to the very core, but he likes it a lot and he thinks that he could stand to spend an awful lot of time in there.

Lo accompanies him most nights, and he knows that a lot of people assume they're together. It's simpler that way, so he lets them think that – it saves him fending off the Muggle girls drawn to his good looks and the Muggle boys (and men) ensnared by Lo's. The Veela might be more diluted in her than in him, but it still gives them both a very subtle _something_ that is nigh on impossible to resist.

"Beer?" she asks him when they arrive one evening – later than usual, today – at around nine thirty, already on her way to the bar.

"Peroni," he confirms, tossing a few Muggle coins at her and sliding onto a barstool, watching as she confidently pushes her way through a gaggle of people at the bar, getting to the front with very little effort. Lo is the sort of girl that people _notice, _you see.

Louis watches her pensively from his spot nearly opposite her as she leans on the bar and beams engagingly up at the barman, shamelessly flirting with him – she's harboured a secret crush since they first started coming here.

She's technically his niece, since she's his older sister Victoire's daughter, but she's only two months younger than him and the politics of it all makes his head hurt to think about it, so they don't usually discuss their relationship. They're more like cousins, although they're best friends at the same time, and he likes what they have. It's easy and it's comfortable and they share a flat and he wakes her up too early in the morning and she retaliates by bringing seemingly never-ending streams of boys back. Louis is all too used to getting up at his usual absurd hour and finding some sod in _his_ kitchen using _his_ kettle to make tea. But he forgives her because, well, they love each other and it's weird to think about being apart.

She gets the beers and returns to him, smile wide, cheeks somewhat flushed.

"Progress?" he inquires with a grin, poking her teasingly in the side.

"Fuck off," she retorts, hiding her smile behind her long blonde hair, brown eyes glittering, "Just because you couldn't charm a dead duck."

"That's a lie, and you know it," Louis informs her loftily, "I could get any one of the girls in this bar without even trying."

"Go on, then," she challenges, that glint in her eye at the prospect of a bet pure Weasley, "Pick a girl and charm her without trying. Two galleons you can't."

"You're on," Louis replies confidently, twisting in his seat to scan the bar for possible girls, blue eyes alighting thoughtfully on a redhead near the door to the loos and then a blonde by the music machine.

There's the sound of the door opening and shutting, and Louis turns further to see who's just come in, whether they might be a prospect, and then freezes. Lo notices his unusual stillness and cranes her neck to see who it is.

She rolls her eyes and gives Louis a "tut" that her Great Grandma Weasley would be proud of, before turning back to face forwards and trying to catch the barman's eye.

But all Louis is seeing is the girl in the doorway. She's _amazing_, he can't help but think, all long legs under her short skirt and limpid brown eyes that sweep across the room saying so much more than her full, kissable lips ever could.

"Her," he says somewhat hoarsely, snapping Lo out of her eye-contact with the barman, "She's the one."

"I'm upping the bet to five galleons," Lo informs him with a grin, having taken in the arrogant tilt of the girl's chin and the admiring stares of the other guys in the bar, "No backing down or else your man-card is forever invalidated."

"You're on," Louis replies, already halfway off his seat and over to where the girl has sat down.

"You're dead," Lo calls to his retreating back – she knows this type of girl, you see, _is _this type of girl – and then turns back to the bar.

;;

Half an hour later Louis is sitting, feeling thoroughly rejected for probably the first time in his life, with Lo up in their flat. She's pressed a cup of tea into his hands and, atypically, doesn't complain even once that he dragged her away from her flirting.

"I don't believe it," he says, accepting the tea absently, barely noticing as she sits down next to him, "I just don't believe it."

"She didn't even tell you her name, did she?" Lo inquires, and Louis turns around because he can just _hear_ the grin in her voice and he knows what she's thinking.

"Okay, okay, I know this is enormously satisfying for you and all, but –"

"Oh, Louis, you have _no idea_," she tells him firmly, grinning broadly, "For as long as I can remember you've had girls all over you – d'you remember Clara Duvale? We were _six_, Lou, and she told you she wanted to marry you. And then there was Izzy and Frankie and Eliza and Harriet… too many to even remember. And then we got to school and – hell, Lou, I don't remember a single girl _ever _saying no to you!"

"Yeah, well, it's not like boys ever say no to _you_, is it," Louis responds caustically, almost wincing as he thinks back over all those years of girls – a pretty good record, he has to admit, if he went between the ages of six and twenty without a girl ever saying no to him.

"Danny," Lo replies instantly, and Louis has to concede that point, remembering the hulking Quidditch player who'd so consistently refused Lo's advances. It was the first and last time he ever saw her crying over a boy.

"She was so… just so…_everything_. Everything I ever wanted. So… so…" Louis tries to explain, his mind looping back to the girl from the bar, his brain just not cooperating in conveying what he wants to say.

"I know," Lo replies gently, patting his knee, "It'll be fine, Lou. There are plenty more fish in the sea."

"I'm allergic to fish," he reminds her, and she gives a sigh and another 'tut' and orders him to drink his tea.

;;

He forces Lo to accompany him back the next night, and the next, and every night the girl is there and every time Louis goes up to her she turns him away quickly and effortlessly. Louis keeps asking, hoping he'll wear her persistence down or something, but even the classic, "Hey, I'm Louis, my cousin's Hugo Weasley from Catacomb," which has worked in the past when all else has failed, doesn't prompt the flicker of a response.

Lo refuses to go back with him after six nights, but he keeps going, determined to wear this girl down. He doesn't know how, when he knows so little about her, she can have so thoroughly ensnared him.

"Just one date," he says to her one night without so much as a hello, distracting her from her friends – who all start giggling behind their hair, which is at least a small boost to his injured ego – and tapping her gently on the shoulder.

"For the last time, _no_," she replies emphatically, "Don't make me take out a restraining order."

"But you won't even tell me _why_," he complains heartily, folding his arms as he stares down at her, "Don't I even deserve an explanation?"

"Fuck off," she orders him shortly, and then turns back to her friends and engages them in deep conversation. Louis sighs and retraces his steps to his lonely seat on the bar.

;;

"Your name, at least give me your name," he's asking eleven nights later. Yes, he's definitely become a bit of a stalker, but the fact that she's not bothered trying to find another bar to hang out in yet is oddly encouraging and the fact that her friends keep meeting her eyes and giggling makes him think that maybe he's still got a shot at this.

"What do I get in return?" she inquires boldly, and Louis pauses to think about that one for a moment, before something occurs to him and he beams broadly.

"Dinner."

She sizes him up thoughtfully, and then he believes he might just see the glimmer of a smile at the corner of her lips, "If I tell you my name, do you promise to leave me alone for at least a week?"

"I promise," he tells her sincerely, beaming like an idiot, and she's certainly smiling just a little bit now.

"I'm Laura."

"Hi, Laura," he says with his best lady-killer smile, "I'm Louis."

"I know. Now piss off."

;;

Three nights later she marches up to him when he's sitting alone at the bar (and, yes, this is becoming an embarrassing pattern, your point?) and pokes him somewhat too hard for his liking in the back.

"Bloody hell, what're you – oh, Laura, hi!"

He is so genuinely taken aback by the fact that she's initiated contact that his brain almost goes into meltdown. He manages to cobble together a veneer of cool somehow, raising an eyebrow and putting on his sexiest voice.

"You want a drink?"

"Actually," she says shortly, her eyes raking up and down him, "What I want is to have sex. With you. Now."

"Right now?" Louis gasps, glancing wildly around him at the other people in the bar, and she stifles a laugh and rolls her eyes and grabs him by the shirt collar, dragging him off his stool.

"No, not right now. I thought at your house – you do have _somewhere _to live, right?"

"N- yeah, of course," Louis replies slowly, following her out into the London night, head spinning, "But… why? Why on Earth are you suddenly coming onto me like this?"

"I'm bored," she informs him as though this is the most natural thing in the world, "And I just broke up with my boyfriend. It's not exactly a secret that you fancy me. I was trying to think of someone who could give me one hell of a night, and you seemed the type."

Louis feels his ego swell, but it rapidly deflates again as she carries on.

"You know, good-looking, arrogant, up himself, convinced he's God's gift to womankind…"

"Cheers."

"Don't deny it," she teases with a grin, and it's a harsh character dissection and he'd like to argue but then they're at his flat block and he kisses her in the lift on the way up and then they crash through the door, barely waving hello to a thoroughly astonished Lo in the kitchen before barrelling into Louis' room and losing themselves in each other.

;;

The next morning he wakes up and she's gone. He can't deny that he's somewhat relieved – she'd been worth those weeks, yes, but it turns out that she doesn't have an awful amount going on upstairs, and as he lies on his back and stares up at the blank white ceiling he concludes that maybe it's time he started looking for real relationships rather than lusting after unobtainable girls.

There's a gentle knock at his door, and then Lo pushes it open, balancing two mugs of tea precariously in one hand.

"How'd it go?" she inquires as she seats herself wobbily on the side of his bed, smacking his knee to make him move up, handing tea over to him, "Was she 'everything you ever dreamed' and all?"

"Sort of," he replies ponderously, still slightly away with the fairies, "But it was kind of… I dunno. Like the fun went out of it the minute I got her."

"Boys," Lo says with a righteous roll of her eyes, moving out of poking-reach and taking a big gulp of her tea, wincing as she burns her tongue, "I'm sure you'll find someone, Louis. You're a great catch."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, spare me the self-help lecture," he teases, slipping his foot out from under his duvet to nudge her in the leg.

"You'd be lost without my lectures," she replies in a sanctimonious tone, and then gets up off the bed, balancing her tea carefully, "And get out of bed, you lazy arse. I've got Katie coming around in an hour for lunch."

"Who's Katie?" Louis asks as he clambers reluctantly out of bed, keeping his sheets wrapped around his waist and heading into the bathroom.

"Only my best girl friend," Lo calls after him, sounding exasperated, throwing a pillow at him, "I've known her for a year now, Lou, it's about time you met her, for Merlin's sake!"

Louis laughs and tries to recall a face to put to Katie's name, but fails.

;;

One hour later Louis is sitting on the couch flicking idly through channels on the television when there's a knock at the door.

"Lo, door!" he yells towards the kitchen, but all he hears in response is a clatter of pots and a loud swearword, so with a grumble he struggles to his feet and opens the door.

"Hi," the girl on the other side says, looking a little taken aback at the sight of him, cheeks flushing red, "I'm Katie."

"Louis," he replies with a smile, standing aside to let her in, "Lo's uncle."

"We pretend we're cousins," Lo informs her, appearing from the kitchen, looking slightly panicked, "Otherwise it freaks people out. Ignore his charm, he's really an arsehole."

"Actually, I'm lovely," Louis responds firmly, nodding seriously down at Katie, "Ignore her. She's just jealous because I'm better-looking than her."

Lo throws a spatula at him and he dodges it, and by the time he's given up trying to retrieve it from where it's lodged in the wall - Lo can _throw _- his niece has beckoned Katie into the kitchen with her.

Louis watches the pair of them disappear, Lo's golden hair in front of Katie's chestnut, and he's thinking that something about Katie could be very easy to love when she pauses and turns in the doorway, glancing back at him with a shy smile.

Louis feels his heart beat a little faster, and in that moment is enormously glad that he decided to stay in for lunch.

* * *

**a/n**: if you've read to the end of these, thank you so much! You're all stars and I love you to pieces, each and every one of you!

(Still please don't be favouriting with reviewing, thank you muchly!)


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